


things we lost in the fire

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Avatar & Benders Setting, Angst, Avatar State, Found Family, M/M, Violence, War, more violent than Avatar but probably less than Les Mis, this used to say 'not abandoned i swear' but I LIVED BITCH
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-14 23:56:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 33,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7196675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Are you really…him?”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“Unfortunately for us all,” Grantaire said.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Everything might have changed when the Fire Nation attacked, but that was some fiftyyears ago, and what matters is now.  And now, the Avatar is on the run, the Crown Prince of the Fire Nation is missing, and history is on a pivot point.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. all this bad blood here

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly I have no excuse for any of this. I'm sorry. I was coerced. I'm not sure these two things were ever meant to mesh like this.
> 
> Blame ThoseWhoFavorFire (I will make that a link as soon as it's not fuck-all-thirty in the morning).

The landslide didn’t take him by surprise.  It was hard to take an earthbender by surprise, and harder when that earthbender had spent ten years mostly fending for himself.  So Grantaire was well out of the path of the falling rocks before they started to slip, and fully intended to let nature take its course.  The rocks were large, but they could be cleared easily, and he was trying to make this village last more than a season, which meant _not_ doing things like diverting massive rockslides.

It was harder to conscience doing nothing when he heard the shout of alarm from the road, and looked over to see two men dressed in Water Tribe blue, standing in the road like a pair of stunned moose lions.  One of them had clearly fallen, standing awkwardly with all of his weight on one foot, and the other had opened a waterskin as if waterbending was going to help them against boulders the size of wagons.

Grantaire could hear his teeth grinding together already.

Briseis growled behind him, low in her throat, and he muttered darkly as he darted forward to stand between the men and the rocks.  The stones struck thunder as they clattered down the mountainside, sharp-edged broken flecks flying ahead like scouts.  It was like facing the wrath of a god—nothing in that rockslide cared who died under its power.

Grantaire planted his feet and took a deep breath, hands coming up into a familiar fighting pose.  Breath in.  Breath out.  And move.  His hands slammed outward, to the left, and the rockslide diverted itself, water around a dam.  He slid through the pose and took a step into another, driving his heel into the ground, and the earth beside the road sank.  The rocks crashed to a halt in the hollow, piling up around each other, and pebbles spilled onto the road over the lip, tiny and unthreatening compared to the menace of the rockslide.

He gave it a moment to be sure that the threat was over before he turned on the two Water Tribe men, his lips pressed together and one eyebrow cocked.  They were frozen, staring at him with slack mouths and wide eyes.

“Honestly that was the stupidest thing I’ve seen in a long time,” he said baldly.  “And if you knew me better, you’d know how impressive that is.  Are you idiots or just unlucky?”

“Unlucky,” the injured one said, voice heavy with resignation.  His skin was darker than his companion’s, and he was much broader through his shoulders, rope-cords of muscle clear even through his clothes.  His head was neatly shaved down to the skin, and he carried a spear with the attitude of someone who, while competent with their weapon of choice, nonetheless expected it to turn around and bite them.  “And lost.”

“I got that part for myself,” Grantaire said, sweeping a hand to encompass their clothing.  “You couldn’t stand out more if you tried.”

“We appreciate your help,” the shorter man said, visibly pulling himself together.  He wasn’t remarkably slender, although he looked it next to his companion, and his hair was tied back into a braid that was beginning to come undone, black curls spilling out around his face.  “I’m Joly of the Northern Water Tribe.  This is my friend Lesgle.”

“I normally use Bousset,” he said, lips quirking up.  He tried to step forward, offering a hand to Grantaire, and his leg buckled noticeably beneath him.  Joly managed to jam a shoulder under Bousset’s arm, stumbling under his weight, and lowered him to the ground as gracefully as possible.

“You’re going to make your ankle worse,” Joly snapped, swatting his friend several times in the shoulder and chest to make him hold still.

“Relax, Jolllly,” Bousset said, turning the liquid consonant into a rolling drawl.

Grantaire watched Joly tug the hem of Bousset’s pants up, revealing a nasty bruise and swelling around his ankle, and he chewed on his lower lip.  Letting out a sigh, Grantaire looked back over his shoulder and nodded to Briseis.

“I can help you get him back to the village,” he said as the grizzly wolf prowled up behind him, her sheer bulk earning a glance from the two travelers on the ground.  “There’s a doctor we can get for him.”

Joly looked up and flashed a remarkably cheerful smile.  “No need, I can do it.  Here, Bousset, hold this.”  He pushed the waterskin into the injured man’s grasp and gestured, the water flowing out in a small stream to cling around his hands.  Grantaire watched closely, filing the movement away to experiment with later—it was smoother than earthbending, a sort of ripple from fingertip to elbow, and Joly’s hands never quite stopped moving.  The water glowed, moonlight-silver around Joly’s slender fingers, and he pressed his palms to Bousset’s injured ankle.  The bruising evaporated as if it had never been, the swelling vanishing as Bousset twisted his foot with a grin.

Grantaire could feel himself staring, his lips parted as he watched Joly pull a near-miracle out of the water.

Forget commanding the elements, Grantaire thought, halfway to laughter, _that_ was a lot more useful.

“So,” Joly said, as bright and cheerful as if it was perfectly normal to nearly die in a rockslide and be saved by a passing earthbender.  “Do you have a name?”

“You can call me R,” Grantaire said automatically, reaching out and sinking his fingers into the thick ruff of silver fur around Briseis’ throat.  She rumbled at him and stuck her muzzle fondly into his riot of dark curls, the cold touch of her nose against the back of his neck making him twitch and side-step away with a betrayed look.

Bousset raised his eyebrows as Joly returned the water to the skin at his hip.  “Your name is a letter?  Also, is that thing yours?”  Bousset nodded to Briseis and she raised her upper lip at him, baring teeth that were all wolf.  Her bear side mostly appeared in her size—as tall as Grantaire at the shoulder—and her powerful shoulders and deep chest.  She was an unfriendly creature at the best of times, Grantaire would be the first to admit it, but her menacing look was all for show.

Mostly for show, he revised internally, and gave her a thump on the shoulder with his fist, just ahead of the line of her rudimentary leather harness.  It was not unlike punching a furred wall, all solid muscle and bone under his hand.  She turned an ear back to him, half an eye, just enough to see what he was doing, and her snarl faded reluctantly.

“Bris is mine,” he confirmed shortly.  “And I didn’t say my name was R, I said you could call me that.  Did you two want into town or were you going to sit around on the road until the whole damn mountain falls onto your heads?”

“Oh, town, please,” Joly said, scrambling to his feet in a confusion of limbs.  He gave Grantaire another beaming smile, and now that Bousset was unhurt the smaller man almost bounced on his toes.  “We’ve been sleeping on the road for a week, do you have an inn?”

“Yeah,” Grantaire said, watching Bousset stand.  His leg seemed stiff, but it took his weight easily.  “Bris can take your bags if you have any.  How did you do that, with the water?”

Joly’s smile faded and his brow wrinkled.  “It’s…”

Bousset’s hand came down on Joly’s shoulder emphatically.  “Healing is a very rare skill, and Joly is incredible at it,” he said, setting his jaw and daring Grantaire to disagree.  “I’ve seen him practically raise the dead.”

“Bousset,” Joly said, turning scarlet beneath the sun-darkening of his skin.  “You absolutely have not seen that.”

“Healing, huh?” Grantaire said, studying them for a moment.  He had policies about getting too deeply involved with archaic traditions and their inevitably catastrophic fallout—specifically, _don’t_ —and he prided himself on being able to recognize them at twenty paces.  This was definitely one of those, and as such he was staying out of it.  “Well, I can’t even mend a paper cut, so you could be able to give people wings for all I know.”

They both burst out laughing at that and Grantaire grinned a little.  This was good, this was easy.  He had done worse things in his life than meet these men, even if they were probably never going to see each other again.

“Did you say that your—Bris?  That she could take our bags?” Joly asked, giving the grizzly wolf a wary look.

“Briseis,” he confirmed, and the healer stepped forward, a pair of heavy satchels in hand, small bedrolls strapped to them.  Briseis grumbled at him, a half-hearted thing that Grantaire could admit looked quite menacing from anyone else’s perspective.  He thumped her again and the grumble ratcheted up a few notches as he stepped forward and took the satchels from Joly.  “She’s all talk.”

“Maybe so,” Joly said, skirting back as Grantaire hooked the satchels to her harness, the smooth red leather bright against her silver fur.  “But she looks like she can back it up.”  Briseis chose that moment to twist around and nibble at Grantaire’s closer hand, looking up at him as her teeth left shallow dents in his skin.  He patted her muzzle absently and let her.

“Nah, she’s a sweetheart.”

Bousset gave her a considering look, running a hand back over the smooth dome of his scalp, and said, “Whatever you say, I guess.  Which way to town?”

Grantaire extracted his hand from Briseis’ affections and gestured down the road.  “Follow me, gentlemen.”

The walk was unhurried, almost lazy, Grantaire walking with one hand on Briseis’ shoulder, twined into her fur, and the Water Tribe men on his other side.  Joly had a slight limp, although it didn’t seem to trouble him in walking and he wryly remarked that at least he always knew when it was going to rain.  An offer of a ride on Briseis’ back was immediately turned down and she made a chuffing noise not unlike laughter.

“How smart is she?” Joly asked, a glint of academic’s curiosity in his eye.  “Does she understand speech?”

Grantaire simply shrugged.  “How smart is anyone?  I don’t know.”  He glanced at Briseis, who was doing a good impression of a benign pack animal, and said, “She’s always understood me just fine.”  _But that’s different_ , he added silently, and unsubtly changed the subject.  “So, if you two don’t mind my asking, what brings you so far from home?”

Joly’s eyes flickered away, his everpresent small smile fading slightly.  “You know how it is.  People are…”  He waved a hand.  “Difficult.”  Bousset, scowling, muttered something that sounded pejorative under his breath.

“Yeah, I know how that is,” Grantaire agreed, a wry edge touching his voice.  “So you left?  I’m not one to judge, but it’s a bit of a trip from the North Pole.”

Joly slanted a look at Bousset and his long, deft fingers came up to rake through his hair.  “Our tribe has…traditions,” he said.  Grantaire cocked an eyebrow, but said nothing—behold his shock, he thought dryly, _traditions_ were causing problems again.  “Men can’t train as healers, and women can’t train as fighters.  When they found out I was figuring out how to heal in secret, they said I could either stop or leave.”

“So we left,” Bousset said, setting his jaw stubbornly.

“ _I_ left,” Joly said, rolling his eyes.  “Bousset followed me like an idiot.”  Bousset ignored him with the attitude of someone doing a great service for a deeply confused friend.  “What about you, do you often run around stopping avalanches?”

Grantaire forced himself to smile lightly, gesture vaguely to his green vest and brown pants, and say, “Rockslides are about my limit, actually.  Earthbenders aren’t much good against avalanches.”

For someone who lied so much, you’d think it would stop making him so tense.

“We really do appreciate it, by the way, R,” Joly said, flashing Grantaire a smile.  “Bousset’s luck is just awful.”

“I’m sure it’s not that bad,” Grantaire said, trying for diplomatic and probably landing somewhere closer to dismissive.

Bousset looked glum.  “It is,” he assured Grantaire.  “It would have been just typical for a sprained ankle to get us both killed.”

Grantaire muffled a laugh as they broke free from the treeline and started to pass the fields outside town, falling into silence.  Once they had passed into the outskirts of the village, Grantaire slowed and said, “It’s not a big town, but there’s an inn attached to the tavern.  I can show you, if you’d like.”

Bousset and Joly looked at each other and shuffled awkwardly.

“Well,” Bousset said, sheepish.  “We don’t really have any Earth Kingdom money.”

There was a pause as Grantaire came to a halt and blinked at them.  “You did not think this through at all, did you.”  They both hunched into their shoulders a little and he sighed, releasing Briseis to rake both hands through his curls.  It left them even wilder than usual, giving him a haphazard look.  “All right.  While you figure out what to do, I can take you to the tavern and you can at least get something to eat and drink.  I have an arrangement with the owner.  This way.”

He led them down the street to the town square, presided over by the inn, and gave Briseis an affectionate knock on the muzzle as she compliantly went and sat beside the bubbling fountain in the center of the square.

“Are our things…safe?” Bousset asked, and Grantaire wondered wryly how often his apparently awful luck had resulted in theft.

“Anyone who wanted them would need to get past Briseis,” he said with absolute confidence, steering the pair of them toward the tavern door.  “And you don’t need to worry that she’ll wander off.  She wouldn’t leave me.”

“So did you just…pick up a grizzly wolf pup one day?”

“Bris and I are old friends,” Grantaire said, letting his face settle into hard lines, the kind of expression that he'd cultivated to end conversations fast.  It worked, and he pushed the pair of them through the door, into the sunlit tavern.

“R!” the owner called jovially, pausing as he wiped down the bar.  It was the middle of the afternoon, so the place was somewhere between mostly empty and mostly full, a few tables of people here and there.  The tables were all well-scrubbed, with a candle for more direct light that left wax drops in the center of the wood.  The owner, Wyn, was a stocky and good-natured man with a growing bald spot that he seemed determined to make up for with his prodigious mustache.  He pulled out a mug, then paused and took another look at the three of them, and added two more.  “The usual, I assume?”

Grantaire paused for a moment, then shook his head minutely.  “Just water, for the moment.  And some food for my friends, here,” Grantaire said.  “On me.  Whatever you have that’s good for travelers.”

“Coming right up,” Wyn said, cheerful, and gestured the three toward the tables.  Out of habit, Grantaire drew them to a corner near the back wall, as far from the door as he could manage, with a view of the whole room.  Joly and Bousset sat down across from him, looking bemused.

“You said you have an arrangement with him?” Bousset asked as Joly fastidiously folded his hands together, just above the wooden table.

“Yeah,” Grantaire said absently.  “His sister and her husband have a farm.  Taxes are too high for them to hire someone to turn all their land this year, so I did it.  I don’t mind getting paid in food and wine.”

“And we know how lucky we are to have his help,” Wyn announced, setting down three mugs full of water and two bowls of a thick and hearty stew from his tray.

Grantaire felt his lips thin out, and said, “I just needed a way to get paid, I’m not doing anything special.”

Wyn gave him an impatient glance, but let it go.  “So!  We don’t often get Water Tribe down here on the continent, what brings you boys out of the cold?”

Bousset scowled again, but Joly awarded him a bright smile and said, “Education.  I wanted to see the world, learn some advanced healing techniques, and Bousset came with me.”  He gave Bousset a gentle nudge with his shoulder and the other man fell out of his ill temper as if by magic.

“A healer!” Wyn boomed, clapping his hands together.  More than a handful of heads popped up around them, eyes skipping over Grantaire to fix on the newcomers.  “I tell you what, boy, if you’re as strapped for Earth Kingdom coin as you seem to be--”

“Eating on the local drunkard’s charity, you mean?” Grantaire muttered dryly.

“Exactly,” Wyn said, blithe as ever.  “There are more than a few people here who would appreciate a once-over from a healer.  Even,” he said over Joly’s protests, “a half-trained one.  Now,” he continued with a stern point of his finger, “you two eat, and if you want more just wave me down, or Myra, my daughter.  Can’t imagine you’ve had much over the last few days.” 

He clapped Bousset on the shoulder jovially as he turned and left, and almost knocked him straight into the bowl of stew.  As it was, Bousset caught himself on the table and it wobbled dangerously, sending the lit candle tumbling onto the wood.  Bousset groaned in dismay and Joly yelped, reeling back in surprise when the flame fell toward him.

Grantaire reached out hastily as soon as it hit the wood and covered the flame with his palm.  Deep breath, feel the air, and _pull_ with the hand hidden under the table, and the fire guttered out as the oxygen vanished from around it to coalesce around his hidden hand.  It was a risky move, oxygen being fairly explosive in concentrated doses, but he released it as soon as the heat was gone.  When he raised his hand, it looked like he had simply taken the risk of patting the flame out bare-handed, scorch marks on the table and a red mark where it had kissed the base of his first finger.

“Your luck really is terrible,” he said, arching an eyebrow at Bousset, who huffed a laugh as Joly snatched Grantaire’s wrist and peered at his palm.

“It’s awful,” Bousset confirmed, sheepish, and Joly gave an experimental poke at Grantaire’s hand.

“I’m fine,” Grantaire said, pulling at his hand, and Joly’s grip locked down.

“You put out a fire with your hand, you’re not fine.”

“Sure I am,” Grantaire protested, flexing his fingers to prove the point.  There was a mild ache in the skin below his first finger, but nothing severe.  It barely qualified as a burn.  He’d gotten worse from bright sunlight.  He twisted his wrist, sliding his fingers behind Joly’s hand, and Joly’s fingers sprang open, letting him pull his hand back.  “Eat, and try not to cause any more catastrophes for a couple of hours.”

Joly gave him a look, but Bousset didn’t seem inclined to argue, falling on the still-steaming stew with glee.  Joly followed suit, and Grantaire stood, picking up the fallen candle and refitting it into its holder before taking the whole thing to the nearest empty table.  He touched the wick to the burning candle and it lit easily.

It was frustrating to do things the normal way, Grantaire could admit it, but he’d been at it for so long that lighting the candle with firebending might be outside his capacities anyway, he thought ruefully as he carried the candle back to the corner table.

That was wishful thinking, though.  Some things could be lost through lack of use.  He’d never been fortunate enough.

He set the candle back on the table and returned to his chair across from the two Water Tribe men, and took a drink of his water, absently wishing that it was wine.

The meal was quiet, largely because it was impractical for Joly and Bousset to carry on a coherent conversation while they were so determined to eat Wyn out of house and home.  Grantaire didn’t mind sitting in silence, pulling bits of soil and dust from his hands and clothes with earthbending until he was perfectly clean and he had a compact marble of dirt between a thumb and forefinger.  It was a meticulous process, but a good cure for boredom and easy training in finesse.

They had been there almost an hour, and Joly and Bousset were both on their third bowl of stew, when a man stepped through the door and walked up to Grantaire’s side.

“R,” he said quietly, and Grantaire looked up in surprise.

“Lore,” he said, trying to keep his voice neutral.  Lore was generally serious, but the look on his face now trended toward almost grief-stricken.  “What can I do for you?”

“I’m sorry,” Lore said, reaching out and gripping Grantaire’s sleeve.  It was a childlike gesture, unsuited to a man with a grown son and daughter, and his fingers shook.  “I’m sorry, they have my children.  I had to tell them.”

Grantaire schooled his features into the calmest mask he could manage and kept his voice low.  “Lore, what did you do?”

“I’m sorry,” the man said again, and dropped Grantaire’s sleeve, backing up toward the door so quickly he almost tripped and darting outside.

Grantaire didn’t even have time to stand before a new figure appeared in the doorway, dressed in a black coat edged with the color of dried blood.  The Fire Nation soldiers strode inside and the noise in the tavern died instantly.

“We’ve received intelligence,” the woman in the lead, wearing the insignia of a captain, drawled, “that the Avatar is here, in this village.  You’ll hand him over to us, now.”

“I think you must be mistaken,” Wyn said, voice unusually stern from where he stood with his hands pressed hard against the bar.  “We are a very small village, and any strange bender would be obvious.  If you want an earthbender, we might be able to help you, but otherwise your intelligence is incorrect.”

“Our informant seemed quite sure,” the captain said, her voice losing its lazy tone for something with a sharper edge.  “He claimed that he was saved from drowning with waterbending.  By an earthbender.”

Grantaire locked down his expression, keeping his gaze fixed on the table between his hands.  Joly and Bousset were watching events with wide-eyed alarm, looking to him for guidance, and he was distantly relieved that he had so much practice keeping his face blank, even if he was probably pale enough to be mistaken for a ghost.

“He must have been confused,” Wyn said.  “Drowning can do that to a person.  I know everyone in this town and I’ve seen no sign of any Avatar here.  He’s been missing a long time now.”

“He has indeed,” the captain said, an edge of heat working its way into her voice.  “So I’m sure you appreciate that the Fire Lord is eager to find him.  Now,” she said, prowling forward with her men at her back.  “Here’s the deal I’ll offer you.”

“I don’t want your money,” Wyn snapped.

“Money?  No, I doubt you would.  My deal is that, if you give me the Avatar now, I won’t order my men to burn this little scrap of a village to the ground.”  Grantaire didn’t need to look at her to know that her teeth were bared in a cruel smile—he could hear it.  “Is that a deal you’re more interested in?”

Wyn’s bravado fell away, and Grantaire saw genuine terror flit across his face in the corner of his eye.  “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Wyn insisted.  “We’d have noticed if the Avatar was here, we don’t know who you mean.”  He looked around the tavern and heads shook.  Grantaire didn’t move, staring at the table.  There was no good resolution to this—it was a shame, he’d liked it here, even if it was a bit lonely.

There was a quiet rushing sound, the unmistakable noise of flames bursting to life under the command of a firebender, and Grantaire looked up to see the captain’s face lit in the glow of the fire hovered over her hand.

“Then I guess I’ll start with the inn and work my way out,” she said.

“Stop.”  It took a moment for Grantaire to realize that the voice was his, softer than usual and rough, and he stood.  There was no way he was getting out of this clean, no version of this where he left with his secret intact, but the least he could do was try to prevent the worst of the damage to the village.  “I’ll go with you,” he said, stepping forward with his hands out in a gesture of peace.

“R…?” Wyn asked, visibly baffled.  “What are you talking about?”

“Look, don’t beat yourselves up for missing it,” Grantaire said dryly.  “I’m a pretty good liar by this point.  Doesn’t mean I want to watch all of you die.”  Of course, Grantaire didn’t particularly want to be captured by the Fire Nation for purposes unknown and probably malevolent, but then he didn’t often get what he wanted.  He took a few more steps forward, skirting a table until he was just outside the reach of the soldiers, and stood there, hands at his sides, waiting for the captain to make a move.

“You’re going to come peacefully after all the trouble you’ve gone to?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

Grantaire shrugged, projecting his best attitude of total disinterest.  “Sure.  My life’s not worth much anyway.”

The captain beckoned forward one of the soldiers behind her, the man produced a set of heavy iron manacles, and Grantaire braced himself to do something very stupid.

Breath in.  Breath out.  And move.

His hands came up to just in front of his chest and he inscribed a circle through the air with them, ending with his palms open toward the soldiers.  A burst of frigid wind rushed past him and—he noticed with satisfaction—bowled one of the soldiers over outright.  It wasn’t a proper airbending move at all, an Air Nomad would probably be appalled at his technique, but he’d figured it out several years back as effective in a pinch.  And given the circumstances, he thought he could be forgiven for being more or less uneducated in an entire element.

Breath in, out, move.

He shifted his feet, settling his weight through his heels, and squared his shoulders, raising his hands in front of him.  This move, at least, he’d actually been trained for.  One hand pressed flat in front of him, the other palm-out, he made a violent wrenching motion, and the stone floor of the tavern cracked like an eggshell.  He’d taken precautions with his aim, so that none of the civilians fell into the crevasse, but the soldier with the manacles tumbled down with two of his compatriots, the captain clinging to the edge dangerously.

Breath in, out, move.

He took a step forward, driving his heel into the floor, and a threatening shudder traveled through the ground, and the captain lost her grip.  She shouted as she fell—he didn’t know how deep the hole he’d opened was, but from the sound of it, she fell quite a distance.  The thud of her hitting the bottom had an uneasy crunching undertone that spoke volumes.

The other soldiers began to back away, trying to fall back into a combat formation, and Grantaire raised his voice for the first time.

“Briseis, _come_!”

The shadow that fell across the door this time was accompanied by a thunderous snarl, and a paw as large as a dinner plate striking out at the closest soldier.  He went down without a sound, and she snagged another soldier, this time with her teeth.  Grantaire took another step.

Breath in, out, move.

He let his weight rock onto his back foot and brought his forward hand up, picturing a set of scales between the two.  The stone slab the rest of the soldiers stood on, pinned between the gaping crevasse and Briseis, started to tip, a slight angle turning rapidly into a steep incline.  The soldiers scrabbled at the stone, worn smooth by years of customers, to no avail, and tumbled wholesale into the crevasse.

Breath in.  Breath out.  Release.  He pushed his hands down along his center line, and the dust settled.

All told, the fight had taken barely three minutes, and had left the previously neat tavern something of a shambles.  Briseis had blood on her teeth and muzzle, a small pool of the stuff marking the ground at her feet beneath the solder she’d dropped.  A section of floor was at a forty-five degree angle, and there was a great crack splitting the tavern in half, stopping just short of damaging the walls.

“Well,” Grantaire sighed, raking a hand back through his curls.  “I think we’re done here.  I can put the floor back before I leave.  Briseis, back,” he added quietly, pointing, and she retreated from the door. 

Replacing the angled floor was a simple matter of rebalancing the visualized scale, the stone grinding easily back into place.  The crevasse would be harder, largely because there were now half a dozen bodies at the bottom of it.

“Wait,” Wyn said as Grantaire started to press the two halves of the crevasse together again.

“What,” Grantaire said flatly, not pausing.  The edges of the stone brushed, and then with a snap he could feel through his spine the torn earth settled back into place.  The crack through the stones would be permanent, but there was no sign of the gaping hole.  Grantaire released the power again and started for the door.

“Are you really…him?”

“Unfortunately for us all,” Grantaire said, looking down at the two soldiers Briseis had killed.  “I’m really sorry about this whole mess,” he said, and he tried for sincerity, but his voice just sounded bitterly weary.  “We can take care of these two before we leave, if you’d like.”

“We can deal with burying two bodies after you saved the entire village,” Wyn said, firm, and Grantaire’s gaze snapped up.

“Your village was only in danger because I was here,” Grantaire said, and from the shifting eyes around him he doubted he was the only one thinking it.  “This way, when the Fire Nation comes again, you can say you had nothing to do with it and send them on their way.  Bris, drag these men outside.”

Blood starting to dry on the sleek silver fur of her muzzle, Briseis bent to catch the nearer soldier’s armor in her teeth and dragged him outside. 

She looked like a monster, Grantaire thought bleakly, with a dead man in her jaws and his blood streaking her face.  How fitting.

Once they were both outside, Grantaire stepped over the puddle of blood and settled his weight on the dirt.

Breath in.  Breath out.  And move.

Another crevasse gaped wide, deeper this time, and the bodies tumbled into it.  It closed with a harsh crash, leaving a seam in the earth that would disappear with time and rain, and Grantaire beckoned to Briseis. 

“R, wait!” Wyn called, hurrying out the door.  Grantaire ignored him, reaching up to untie the two satchels from her harness and set them on the stone rim of the fountain in the center of the town square, carefully balanced so that they didn’t fall in. 

“Make sure those two get these,” he said over his shoulder, making a few adjustments to Briseis’ harness.  “If you offer them the same deal you did me, the smaller one will work as a healer in town for a while, maybe.  Briseis, down.”  She sank to the ground and Grantaire slid onto her back.  Riding wasn’t especially pleasant without a saddle, but his last one had been destroyed without hope of repair a year back, and he was familiar with using the harness to keep himself in place.  It was a faster method of travel than he could hope for on foot.  She rose to her feet and he looked back down at Wyn.  “You’ll have to deal with the blood yourself, sorry.”

There was an immense clatter from the direction of the door and Bousset and Joly almost broke their necks spilling out.

“Wait!” Joly panted, clinging to Bousset’s shoulder.

Grantaire didn’t answer, leaning forward and nudging Briseis with his knees.  She broke into a long lope at once, toward the south end of town, and left the inn behind them.

After picking up the scant possessions he kept neatly packed up in his lodgings—lately the hayloft of a barn—Grantaire tied  the bag to Briseis’ harness and walked beside her, one hand twined back into her fur for comfort.  They walked until the light from the sun was well and truly gone, and he let her nudge him off the road into the forest, following her numbly until she came to a stop.  She had never led him wrong yet, and in the moonlight filtering through the trees he could see that they were in a small clearing, a river audible somewhere ahead and to the right.

“I don’t think I’m up for fishing tonight, Bris,” he said quietly, and she gave an unmistakably derisive huff before she flopped down onto the ground.  He untied the bag and unbuckled her harness, tossing both aside carelessly, and settled onto the leaf-strewn ground, his back to her massive ribcage and his head tipped back against the hollow behind her shoulder.  Her heart pounded warm and steady beneath him, and he closed his eyes and pretended to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you liked this and/or feel the need to yell at me in a more interactive fashion than AO3 notes, come see me on Tumblr, I am also words-writ-in-starlight there.


	2. call to be heard

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so I SAID I would have it by like Friday or Saturday but it's only Sunday night so I wasn't that far off. Um, my apologies, this chapter did not go as far as I'd intended, so...filler chapter is filler. Also shorter than I'd hoped. This is mostly the stuff that happens between the last chapter and the next Plot Chapter (which includes my angry wild street wife Eponine), with some bonus feelings. Yep. Title's from Bastille's "Get Home," because I've been titling everything in this fic from Bastille songs.
> 
> Please direct all blame toward [ThoseWhoFavorFire](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ThoseWhoFavorFire/pseuds/ThoseWhoFavorFire), who, as usual, is 85% of my self-control. She is also a filthy, filthy enabler.

Grantaire wasn’t sure when he’d managed to actually fall asleep—before birds had started chirping, but after the moon had crossed the midpoint of the sky—but he knew what had woken him up.  Briseis was growling, the low, almost inaudible rumble that shivered through his bones where he was pressed up against her warmth.  It was her warning growl, the one that meant that there was something coming, something that hadn’t quite reached Grantaire’s frail human senses yet.  He reeled to his feet on instinct, and paused.

A dream was slipping away, the misty-edged kind that wasn’t quite a normal dream.  The kind that he was supposed to remember and pay attention to, because it was his _job_.  He was shitty at it—the dreams always slipped away, especially the ones with the iron-tang of the future—but he still tried, sometimes.

There was something…something red, he thought.  Not blood, but cloth, tough and sturdy.  And something gold, surrounded in sunlight.

Briseis’ growl, ratcheting up past sub-vocal into a genuine threat, brought him back to the present with a jolt.  He could hear people approaching now, crashing through the trees like…well, like a couple of people who’d never seen a forest in their lives.  He was pretty good at moving silently, after all this time, and of course Briseis could make a casual observer believe she was a ghost, but the people coming toward them couldn’t have made more noise if they’d marched an army straight into the underbrush.

He spoke from experience, after that one time the Fire Nation had more or less marched an army straight into the underbrush chasing him.

“Quiet, Bris,” he murmured, and her growl receded until it was just a feeling in the air, like approaching thunder.  He swept a glance over the clearing.  It had been dry recently, the ground in need of rain and vulnerable, and the ground was largely lacking in anything that would suit as a weapon.  He settled his weight through his heels, standing in the center of the clearing, and pointed Briseis toward the trees.  She melted into the shadows silently, the early dawn light turning her into a mirage as she slipped away.

Breath in.  Breath out.  Wait.  And move.

He caught a glimpse of the outline of a head, of shoulders, coming toward the treeline, and drove one foot into the earth.  A stone exploded into the air and he thrust his hand out, an open palm strike that sent it flying.  There was a squawk and the person was tackled just in time for the stone to pass over their head.

“We, uh, we come in peace!” called a voice, high with adrenaline, and Grantaire eased out of his stance.

“Joly?”

“Yes?”  The healer clambered to his feet, wincing, and tugged Bousset through the last of the trees.  They looked a mess, sleep-deprived and rumpled as if they’d been walking all night, but they weren’t a threat.

Grantaire sighed and called, “It’s all right, Bris.”  She prowled out of the trees from behind them and he heard Joly give an audible squeak of alarm as she brushed past to loom at Grantaire’s shoulder.  “Why are you two here?”

The two of them traded a few communicative glances before they looked back at him.  “We want to come with you,” Joly said, brash and direct and beaming, squaring his shoulders as if preparing for a fight.

Staring was rude.  Grantaire could hear his etiquette teacher telling him so, even all these years later.  That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to stand there and stare when someone went quantifiably insane right in front of him.

It took a good few minutes for him to put words into speech again, and Bousset and Joly smiled at him the whole time.

“You want to what?”  It had been a long time since Grantaire felt totally at a loss for coherent words.  “I don’t—what— _why_?”  He ran that disastrous question back through his head and added, “And don’t say it’s because I’m the Avatar or I might throw something else at you.”

“Well,” Joly said, in a perfectly reasonable tone, “we don’t have anywhere to go, and we don’t know anyone in the Earth Kingdom, and you’ve started showing up on Wanted posters—we saw them on our way south from the coast, they’re not very _good_ Wanted posters, but now that we know who you are we remembered them—so you’re going to have more trouble getting work in towns, and we figured that between the three of us we would have more luck.”

It’s almost funny, Grantaire thought dazedly, how Joly said that like it was the most logical thing in the world.  He took a moment to sort through the options for how to answer, and settled on, “No.”

“Just…no?” Joly said, looking crestfallen.

Grantaire took another moment and clarified, “ _Hell_ no.” 

“Do you have a single good reason for that?” Bousset asked, his open, friendly face going shrewd, and Grantaire frowned.

“In case it escaped your attention, I’m currently the most wanted person on the continent, and I’m not particularly interested in watching people die for me, so: no.”

“We could just follow you,” Joly pointed out.  “We managed it once already.”

“I noticed that.”

“We could get into a lot of trouble just wandering around without any money.”

“Anyone could.”

“You seem awfully lonely.”

“I have Briseis.”

“Unless I missed something, she can’t talk and you don’t have any friends.”

There was…actually nothing Grantaire could say to that, he had to admit.  It was undeniably true, and he could tell that Joly knew it.

“Wonderful!” Joly said brightly, beaming at him again with the slightly tipsy look of the sincerely sleep-deprived.  “It’s settled then.  We’re coming with you.  So glad we had this talk.”

Grantaire pressed the heels of his hands against his forehead, trying to ward off the leading edge of a tension headache.  “I’m going to die.”

“Oh, cheer up,” Joly said, bouncing forward with his odd half-limp to loop an arm around Grantaire’s shoulders like it was something they did, like he’d known Grantaire for years and been cajoling him out of fits of pessimism just as long.  Joly was a little shorter than Grantaire, he noticed, because he had to stand on his toes to manage it—Grantaire had to sternly repress his immediate instinct to duck away from the invading arm.  “It’ll be fine.  Hey, what’s your name?”

“Grantaire,” he said on a sigh.  “It’s probably on the posters.”

Bousset ambled over, radiating an air of easy satisfaction with his spear over one shoulder, and asked, “So, where are we going?”  He offered one hand, palm open, to Briseis, and she sniffed at him delicately, sharp golden eyes narrowed at them all.

Grantaire sighed and shrugged Joly’s arm off as politely as possible.  “Haven’t given it that much thought.  South, because that’s where the road goes.  We’re avoiding major cities and military bases.”  And shit, here he was saying ‘we’ like he had agreed to it.  This was why Grantaire was always in so much trouble, it was because he was weak against people who bounded up all smiles and pushy affection, and those were _inevitably_ the people who got into trouble.

“Sounds good,” Joly said, unfazed by Grantaire’s retreat.  “We were heading that direction anyway, toward the Southern Water Tribe.”  He shouldered his bag into a more comfortable position and smiled.  “Should we go now?”

“Are you going to pass out?”  Grantaire could feel his eyebrows climbing toward his hairline, eyeing up the two evidently exhausted men critically.

Bousset made a dismissive noise.  “I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

Blinking slowly at them, Grantaire reached out and rested a hand heavily on Briseis’ head, just behind her ears.  He couldn’t believe he was going along with this insanity.  “We’re _definitely_ all going to die,” he decided.  “All right.  Let’s go.”

* * *

It turned out that Bousset and Joly were just as stubborn as they had seemed, at first glance.  They walked half the day before Grantaire drew the line and announced that he was going to find something edible if it killed him and they should probably lie down before they fell over.

By the end of their second week traveling, it had become something of a trend.  Joly would collapse where he stood, still smiling and talking, before he admitted to exhaustion.  Bousset was better, but only because he was evidently in the habit of making sure Joly didn’t do exactly that.  Grantaire hardly knew what to do with them, except try to remember to eat himself and lead by example.

If he was being honest, that was a much more general statement.  Grantaire didn’t know what to do with them, full stop.  He’d managed to tell them exactly nothing about himself save his name, but they didn’t seem offended and weren’t hesitant to tell _him_ whatever came to mind.  He learned that Joly was the oldest of four, that all his siblings were waterbenders too, and that he was near-constantly fretting about some illness or another.  Bousset was the youngest of two, and although his father and brother were both benders, he couldn’t move water with anything other than a bucket, as he said cheerfully.  It didn’t seem to bother him.  Grantaire learned about the great city at the North Pole, carved out of ice and snow, and about the ocean, and about the lengthy list of traditions that made Joly and Bousset angry, and the shorter list of traditions they remembered fondly.

It was…nice, he decided at length one night, leaning back against Briseis and trying to sleep without success.  Strange, almost completely outside his experience—he hadn’t had a friend who knew who he was since Floreal, and that was ten years ago now—but nice.

It had been fifteen days since they left the village by the time they came across another one of decent size.  The northern range of the Earth Kingdom was more thinly populated than the eastern and southern areas, with the two major cities, but more to the point, Grantaire had some experience with being on the run and had opted against a handful of closer ones.  They had set up their rudimentary camp in the forest just outside the village, and Briseis had brought down a pair of rabbit deer for their dinner.  Now the sun was finally starting to set, throwing heavy shadows across the forest floor around their fire, and they had largely settled for the night.  Joly and Bousset were playing some kind of clapping game that Grantaire didn’t recognize, but that seemed to require too much coordination for Bousset’s comfort.  Joly was winning every time, but the other man didn’t seem bothered, laughing every time his hands slipped off the pattern or he lost the chant.  Grantaire had filched a piece of charcoal from the edge of the flames and, leaning against the broad trunk of a tree, was sketching absently on the back of a Wanted poster they’d found two days back.

The picture on the front was terrible, he’d noted clinically.  If he didn’t know it was supposed to be him, he would never have made the association.  It didn’t have his name on it, either, which he considered to be a critical error on their part.  His extensive criticism of the Fire Nation’s techniques had rendered Joly almost incoherent with laughter, and Bousset had grinned all day.

Charcoal from a fire was a messy medium, both on paper and for the artist, leaving broad black smears across everything, but he didn’t particularly mind.  He didn’t have the chance to draw often, and wasn’t in a position to be picky.  He rendered Briseis’ head in a few loose strokes, smudging the charcoal to give the effect of fur, and moved on to Joly’s laughing profile. 

“I didn’t know you were an artist, Grantaire,” Bousset remarked, leaning over his shoulder as Grantaire added a few of the locks of hair perpetually escaping Joly’s braid.

“I’m not,” he said without looking up.  Joly shuffled over without standing up and made an admiring noise in his throat.

“That’s gorgeous,” he said, reaching out to touch the sketch of Briseis.  “Did you work as an artisan before everything?”

Grantaire snorted in amusement.  “I’ve never worked as anything for more than a season.  I’ve been traveling since I was fourteen.  And this…it’s just something to do when I have the time,” he said, dismissive.  He frowned down at the drawing of Joly, and rubbed his thumb beneath the jawline, shadowing the throat more accurately.  An artist, getting paid to draw, getting to _paint_ , even, without anyone to tell him to stop.  He had dreamed about that, once, when he was younger and more naïve.  “It’s not—I’m not any good or anything.”  He could almost taste the glance they traded over his bent head, but they let it go.

“So,” Joly said, shifting until he was propped against the tree beside Grantaire and resting his head on his shoulder.  “Why’d you start moving around so young?”

“Long story,” Grantaire said, his hand slowing to a stop.  His chest tightened, nerves twisting into a knot behind the lower edge of his ribs, and he forced himself not to grit his teeth with it.  “Practical concerns, mostly.”

“Didn’t you miss your family, leaving home so young?”

Grantaire shrugged, Joly’s head bobbing up and down with the motion, and resumed his sketching.  This time a building took shape, unornamented and militant, drawn in harsh lines and heavy shadows.  He spent an extra few moments detailing the doors, marked with a circle enclosing a square, and spoke as dispassionately as he could, keeping his breathing steady and slow around the knot in his chest.  “I never knew my parents.  I grew up on a military base.” 

His hand came to a halt and he looked down at the paper for a long moment, then made an angry noise under his breath and swiped a hand roughly over the page, smudging the sketches beyond repair.  His ears rang distantly, the start of a tension headache twinging at the base of his skull, and there was black charcoal coating his palm.  “It’s just something I do when I have the free time.  I don’t _keep_ them or anything,” he said, standing, and dropped both the poster and the bit of charcoal into the low-banked fire.

Bousset and Joly glanced at each other again behind him, but didn’t press for more information. 

Instead, Joly smiled at him sleepily from against the tree and asked, “Hey, R, did you want me to show you that waterbending move again?”

Grantaire took a deep breath and mustered a small smile in return.  “Maybe tomorrow, Jolllly.”

Joly clicked his tongue and mumbled something about lazy students under his breath, and Grantaire laughed.  He wasn’t really Joly’s student—between formal training when he was younger and what he’d picked up in his travels, Grantaire was a reasonably competent waterbender—but the North was insular, and they’d perfected the thing.  Even though Joly didn’t like combat bending much, he knew tricks of the trade that Grantaire, frankly, wouldn’t have thought of in a million years.  He’d tried to teach Grantaire to heal, too, but without a patient to work on it was virtually impossible, and Grantaire had drawn an emphatic line at injuring someone just to play with a new technique.

He didn’t think he’d be any good at healing anyway.  He’d never had much of a talent for that sort of thing.

“We’re going into the village tomorrow, right?” Bousset asked, stretching out on the ground so that his head was pressed up against Joly’s hip.  Joly’s cheeks turned pink, but he didn’t move away, and he dropped his hand to rest lightly on the curve of Bousset’s shoulder.  The taller man hummed and his eyes flickered closed.

“Yeah,” Grantaire said, uneasy.  He didn’t like being in charge of these things, but he had the most experience.  “We can see if we can get work for the day.  I still have a little money from odd jobs in the last town, probably enough for real food.  Unless there’s anything else we really need…?”

“I don’t think so,” Joly said, sliding down until he was horizontal, Bousset’s head on his upper arm. 

“I mean, unless you have enough to get yourself some kind of weapon,” Bousset added, cracking one eye open to peer at Grantaire, frowning.

“I don’t need a weapon,” Grantaire muttered.

“Just because you can bend doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to take care of yourself without it,” Bousset said, and Grantaire sighed.  They’d had this conversation three times.

“I _can_ take care of myself without bending.”  There was a pause and Grantaire huffed a short laugh.  “All right, fine, Bousset, come here, and try to punch me.  No bending.”

“Grantaire, what are you doing?” Joly asked, wary.  “Bousset, don’t hurt him.”

“He’s not going to hurt me,” Grantaire said calmly.  This, at least, he could do.  He could always fight.  “Come on.  We can resolve this whole issue in two minutes.”

Bousset unfolded himself from the ground and walked over, easy and cheerful, and squared off at arm’s length from Grantaire, who kept his arms by his sides and arched an eyebrow at him.

The punch Bousset threw was half-hearted at best, aimed for Grantaire’s shoulder, and Grantaire rolled his eyes before he caught Bousset’s forearm and twisted, hard.  Bousset dropped to a knee with a yelp, and Grantaire released him from the armlock.

“Now _actually_ try to punch me.  I promise you won’t hit me.”

This time, the punch came in like a rockslide, lightning-quick and powerful, and Grantaire knocked it aside before he slid inside Bousset’s reach and threw a punch of his own that stopped just before connecting with Bousset’s chin.  Instead, Grantaire reached up and poked Bousset in the nose, earning a laugh and a clap on the shoulder.

“You can fight,” Joly said, sounding surprised.

“I wasn’t really trained to fight hand to hand,” Grantaire said with a shrug as Bousset picked up their bedrolls and went back to lay them out beside Joly.  “But I figured it out.  Earthbending translates pretty well, and.”  He paused and chuckled a little, dropping onto the ground beside Briseis, her warm, sleepy bulk a comforting weight at his back.  “Actually most of it’s street fighting.  Stuff I picked up on the road.”

“You think you could teach me some of that?” Bousset asked. 

Grantaire made a strangled sound of disbelief.  “You hit like Briseis, what could you _possibly_ want me to teach you?”

“How to not get punched in the face,” Joly muttered, rolling over in one full turn so that he landed on his bedroll.  “Bousset can hit but he just stands there and lets people beat the hell out of him, it’s so stupid I can’t--”  Bousset’s hand reached down and clamped neatly over Joly’s mouth.

Grantaire laughed more genuinely, then, feeling some of the knot in his chest give way.  The sudden slacking tension made his voice shake a little, like he was going to cry over these two idiots offering him their affection so freely.  It was ridiculous.

“I don’t know if I’m the person to teach you that part,” he admitted, leaning back against Briseis and resting his head in the hollow behind her shoulder.  “I get punched a lot.  I usually win the fights, though.”

“I’ll take it,” Bousset said.  “Tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” Grantaire said quietly, making a sharp gesture with his hands and banking the fire completely.  “Tomorrow.”

He heard their breathing drop off almost at once, slow and steady.  They would be curled together by the time the sun rose, like a set of closed parentheses, the same way they were every night.  It was pretty endearing, actually, the way they gravitated together like puppies from the same litter.  They were…very young.  Bousset was almost as old as Grantaire, Joly only a little younger, but the thought remained.

Grantaire stretched out on the ground next to Briseis and stared up at the stars for a long time.

He wasn’t particularly rested when they rose and went into town the next morning, but there was nothing for it except to continue.  He was used to it.

“So, what are we doing first,” Joly said, beaming widely around at the town.  It was bigger than Grantaire remembered from the last time he had passed it, bustling around them, and the only strange looks were being directed at the Water Tribe men.  Grantaire, for better or worse, blended right in, another Earth Kingdom wanderer looking for refuge from the Fire Nation.  It helped that Briseis, being both ill-tempered and entirely unsubtle, had been relegated to wait in the woods.

“Best place to look for work is an inn or a tavern,” Grantaire said with a shrug.  “Somewhere they sell food and alcohol in large amounts.  Good population turnover.”  He pointed toward the center of town.  “Probably that way.”

“Then that way it is!” Joly said, and seized Grantaire and Bousset by the elbows to tow them along.

It was as they passed into the town square that Grantaire felt something prickle down his neck, like a whisper demanding his attention.  He had learned to trust that prickle—it was very hard to rob the Avatar—and automatically reached down to clamp a hand over the small pouch containing the sum total of their finances.  He caught a wrist, instead.

The boy was skinny, with a wicked smile and eyes that glittered wildly as he twisted free of Grantaire’s grip, tearing the money pouch away as he went.  He bolted into an alley, a mocking laugh drifting back to them, and Grantaire growled as he darted after him, Joly and Bousset in his wake.

The boy was fast, Grantaire would give him that, and clearly knew the town like the back of his hand.  Grantaire had the advantage of longer legs and the ground, murmuring answers in the back of his mind.  Four turns in quick succession led them to a dead end, the boy backed up against a wall with the look of a cornered animal.

“You did pretty well for yourself,” Grantaire said, breathless.  “That’s the closest anyone’s come to robbing me in years.”

“ _You_ did pretty well for yourself,” the boy replied, a suspicious glint in his eye.  “How did you know where I went?”

“Magic,” Grantaire said flatly.  “There’s not enough in that purse to trouble yourself with, kid,” he said, advancing on the boy.

The boy gave it a shake.  “Sounds like enough for a hot meal, to me,” he said, eyes narrowed. 

“Plenty more marks in town.  Don’t make me do something we’ll regret,” Grantaire said, quiet and hard.  He wasn’t sure what was on his face in that moment, but whatever it was, the boy looked genuinely afraid.  Grantaire was going to beat himself up for that later.

“Éponine!” the boy cried, somewhere between a frightened child calling for a parent and a criminal calling in backup.  “Help!” 

The ground opened up beneath them, and they were falling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter is literally halfway done, please don't, like, come for me on that cliffhanger. 
> 
> Also, I'm [words-writ-in-starlight](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com) on Tumblr too, and I would LOVE to talk about this fic because it might expedite the writing process, plot is time-consuming. 
> 
> Also-also, this is an obligatory self-promotion for my other Les Mis series that's currently underway, [the good left undone](http://archiveofourown.org/series/489316), which is the inevitable reincarnation fic every Les Mis author ends up writing eventually. Apparently I've made people cry.


	3. this is what i call life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The travelers pull themselves out of one scrape and land in a worse one. Grantaire loses his temper.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's up, y'all, I wrote motherfucking plot this time. HELL yes. This chapter is fairly short and action-packed, but the next one is already underway, and also there wasn't really...another good place to stop it, so here is the chapter. 
> 
> Title's from the Bastille song "What Would You Do," because...Eponine Thenardier: life goals or wife goals. No one knows. Both. I love Eponine, fight me.
> 
> As usual, please direct all blame to [ThoseWhoFavorFire](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ThoseWhoFavorFire/pseuds/ThoseWhoFavorFire).
> 
> And thank you so much to everyone who has left comments, you're the sweetest, I coo over every last one! (There was one person who was just...straight up incoherent, and honestly that warms the cockles of my cold stony heart.)

Dropping through the air where the ground had been a second ago, Grantaire decided that he didn’t like being on the end of this trick, even if the hole was relatively shallow, only a little deeper than the height of a tall man, and he landed well on his toes.

“Gavroche, are you all right?” a sharp voice asked above them, and a figure appeared at the edge of the pit.  The earthbender, Grantaire was guessing.  From what he could make out, it was a young woman—a teenager—wearing a dress made of undyed cloth.  At his angle, he could just see the expression on her face: towering, protective rage.

“He’s fine,” Grantaire called, settling his weight.

In, out, move.

He raised his hands as if lifting a heavy weight, and the rock beneath them groaned as it lifted them back onto the level of the street.

“That was a good move,” he noted to the girl, who bared her teeth at him like something feral and pushed the boy behind her.  She was even skinnier than the kid was, her dark hair pinned haphazardly out of her face to reveal a swollen bruise purpling down from her temple to the point of her jaw, but her stance was solid as stone.  “Not very effective against another bender, but a decent move.  Nice deal you’ve got here, just in case he gets followed, right?”

“Back off,” the girl snarled.

Grantaire groaned and rubbed his hands over his face, wondering what kind of work he’d need to take in order to get a drink in this town.  “I cannot _express_ how much I don’t want trouble, all right.  We just need our money.  To eat.  Which I’m sure you understand.”

The girl—Éponine, Grantaire thought, and the boy was Gavroche, possibly her brother—raised her hands and he gave her a flat look.

“I don’t want a fight,” he said.  “And the money in the bag isn’t worth it to you.”  And getting outed to the town wasn’t worth it to him, Grantaire added silently.

“Um,” Joly said, trying to slip past Grantaire.  Grantaire’s arm went out to hold him back, and for a moment he almost wanted to smile at how much it made him look like Éponine, holding Gavroche behind her.  “I could heal that bruise for you, if you gave us our money back.”

“Impossible,” she said.

Grantaire could _hear_ Joly’s sunshine-bright smile.  “I’m a waterbender.  Some of us can heal.  Hey, if I’m lying, take the money and go,” he offered, and Grantaire could see that Éponine was tempted.  The swelling had started to obscure her vision—if it got any worse, and it looked like it would, she would be hard pressed to protect the kid.

“All right,” she said, wary.  “But if you’re lying, I’ll bury you.”

“Told you we were all going to die,” Grantaire muttered, but released Joly.  He was being unnecessarily grim, of course, he was certainly capable of handling one earthbender, but depending on how good she was, it wouldn’t be subtle.

Joly uncorked the mouth of his waterskin and drew the water out of it as if pulling a rope, until the liquid swam around his hands in silver-shot clouds.  “This might feel a little strange,” he warned Éponine, and reached out for her face.  He moved slowly, every move clear and steady, but she eyed him with intense suspicion nonetheless.

“Oh,” she breathed when his fingers grazed her cheek, the water pooling across the bruise.  Her eyes flickered closed as Joly cradled her face gently, the swelling sinking away visibly until her skin was skin-colored again, her eyes clear and her face neatly symmetrical.

“Is that better?” Joly asked, lowering his hands and returning the water to his waterskin.  Éponine’s eyes flashed open and she prodded her cheek curiously, a small smile forming on her lips.

“Yeah,” she said.  “Here, Gav, give them their money back.”

Gavroche popped out from behind her, grinning again, and lobbed the money purse at Grantaire, who caught it out of the air with a faint smile of his own.

“Thanks,” Grantaire said.

“Listen,” Éponine said, her face settling back into hard lines.  They were less menacing than before—for someone who only came up to Grantaire’s shoulder, she did ‘menacing’ remarkably well—but wary, her eyes flickering to the roof next to the alley, where she must have been hiding.  “This is a dangerous town for strangers.  Especially strangers with talents like that.  So if you’ll take my advice, do whatever you need to do and then move along.”

“What do you mean?” Joly asked, solemn.

She leaned forward and lowered her voice, as if afraid of being overheard.  Her hand was tight on Gavroche’s shoulder, her knuckles white, and his was on her wrist, soothing.  “You have a powerful earthbender and a waterbender who can heal with you.  I _suggest_ that you get out of town before Patron-Minette finds out and tells Jondrette.  I won’t say anything about the waterbending, but I’ll need to explain how Gav and I lost the money.”  She gave Grantaire an apologetic glance.  “I’m sorry.”

“I get it,” Grantaire sighed.  He did, really.  She was prepared to warn them, but given a choice between her own safety, not to mention that of the kid, and theirs, she was making the obvious choice.  He’d have done the same.  “We’ll get out of town.”

“Good,” Éponine said, rocking back on her heels.  She gave Grantaire a considering look and remarked, “You look a little familiar, have you been through town lately?”

“Not for years,” he said with a half-hearted attempt at a casual smile.  “Just one of those faces.”

She gave him a look absolutely _laden_ with doubt, but said nothing.  “You boys stay out of trouble.  Gavroche, come on.”

“Wait, wait,” he said, wriggling away from her grip and darting up to Grantaire.  “Hang on, how did you know I was trying to take your money?  It’s been years since someone caught me like that.”

For this, at least, Grantaire didn’t need to lie.  “No idea.  No one’s ever been able to pick my pockets without my noticing.  When I learn the trick I’ll let you know.”

“Are you the ones I heard about, who brought the grizzly wolf to town?”

“Grizzly wolves are almost impossible to domesticate,” Grantaire rattled off at once.  “You must have misheard.”

Gavroche, for the first time, looked downright offended.  “My information is always perfect.”

Grantaire cracked a real smile at that.  “I’m sure, kid.  Thanks for this,” he added, gesturing at the two of them with the purse and nudging Joly and Bousset back toward the mouth of the alley.

“A grizzly wolf?” he heard Éponine murmur to Gavroche as they left.  “Are you sure?”

“Positive,” the boy confirmed.

“Better him than me, I guess,” Éponine said, and Grantaire snorted in amusement.

“All right,” he said once they were back in the bustle of the town square.  “Looks like we aren’t going to be able to get work here after all.”

“Because of this Patron-Minette person?” Bousset asked, and Grantaire shook his head.  The Northern Water Tribe inhabited a huge city, but it was only one city, which meant that overall Joly and Bousset had no idea how the Earth Kingdom worked.

“Patron-Minette isn’t a person, they’re a gang,” Grantaire said.  “They’re answering to Jondrette these days, from the sounds of it.  I’ve run into some of his people before, but I didn’t realize their new base was this far north.  The girl—Éponine—she must work for them.”

“They’re dangerous?” Joly asked.

Grantaire couldn’t quite hold back another laugh.  “Jondrette, the boss, is a real bastard.  Heard he sold his oldest son, makes his kids work as thieves and strong-arms for him.  He’s bitter as hell that he’s not a bender.  So yeah, you could say that.”  He went serious, frowning, and said, “If it was just me, I’d stay in town longer, but Patron-Minette is the sort of gang that kills people for being in the way, so--”

“The reward on your head could buy the Fire Lord’s palace and everything inside,” Joly whispered, very dry.  “I really doubt you’d have stayed longer.”

Grantaire waved the concern off as he steered them into the first sizable tavern they reached.  It was true—the reward had been increased about twice a year for twenty-four years, which meant that it was now _prodigious_ —but then again it was difficult to get worked up over something that had been a part of his life for the entire thing.  The Earth Kingdom’s bounty on him, that was a much more concerning concept, although almost entirely unknown.

“If I spent all my time avoiding that, I’d never get anything done,” Grantaire pointed out.  “ _Ever._ I mean, I’d almost hand _myself_ in, if I thought I was going to get the money.  Come on, we have about enough for a meal, it’s almost midday, and then we’ll need to leave.”

The meal was quick and simple, just bread and a thick soup, but almost unspeakably luxurious compared to two weeks of whatever Briseis could bring down and whatever could be collected from the forest.  Joly and Bousset ripped through theirs with something very nearly approaching glee, and Grantaire ate more slowly, but with no less relish.  The easy pleasure of the meal was somewhat spoiled by the wary eye he kept on the door, though.  He missed the assurance of Briseis’ massive strength and sharp teeth, the way he always did when he had to leave her outside of town.  Hell, as long as he was thinking about things he missed, he missed being able to spend a few hours relaxing without worrying about his safety or that of his…traveling companions.  Friends.  Joly and Bousset were his friends, by this point, which was a whole additional layer of guilt over pulling them into his mess.

He tried to shake the thought from his mind as they finished eating.  It was pointless to miss being able to be at ease with friends.  He had reality to deal with, and besides, he’d never really had the luxury before, and one couldn’t miss what they’d never had.

It wasn’t that Grantaire was a pessimist—actually, it absolutely was that Grantaire was a pessimist, which was why the discovery that they had made it back to Briseis without further trouble was a surprise.

It was also why the discovery, some hours later, the sun on its way down as they settled further into the forest for the night, that they had company was _not_.

“Grantaire,” Joly breathed, leaning closer from where he had been cheerfully telling a story about Bousset managing to shatter an ice bridge in the North.  “I think there’s someone in the forest.”

“I know,” Grantaire said, keeping his voice steady.  At his elbow, Briseis was rumbling, a low and steady warning, and he glanced up, following her gaze.  “They know how to hide.  Bousset, you might need your spear.”

Bousset, for all his size and ill fortune, could move in total silence when he wanted to, and shifted into a half-kneeling crouch, spear in hand.

“Careful, there,” a voice from the trees said, lilting, almost teasing, and a slender figure melted out of the shadows.  “We wouldn’t want this to turn violent.”

“No,” Grantaire said dryly.  “We definitely wouldn’t want that.”

The man was young, with the sort of face used to model statues of romantic heroes, all delicate lines and shapely lips, with a dark sweep of eyelashes every time he blinked.  His clothes were dark, but strangely ornate, as if he spent his free time improving them, and he toyed with a dagger in one hand.  The other held a roll of paper, and Grantaire barely repressed the desire to groan and bury his head in his hands.

“Gueulemer,” the young man called over his shoulder, and a man entirely too big to be reasonable appeared at his shoulder.  “Does this man seem to match this description?”  He unrolled the paper with a flourish and Grantaire unfolded himself from the ground, Briseis rising at his side like the tide.

Gueulemer made a show of looking over the poster and squinting at Grantaire, then drawled, “Well, the drawing makes him look like an ugly bastard--”

“I’m flattered,” Grantaire muttered, Joly and Bousset standing on either side of him.  They seemed to be carrying on another one of their silent conversations, but he couldn’t be bothered to pay attention as long as they were relatively out of trouble.

“—but it seems to be him, yeah, ‘Parnasse.”

“Very helpful, thank you,” the young man said, and rolled up the poster again.  “Jondrette, I believe we’ve found him.”

“No thanks to you,” another voice snapped, and the girl from before—Éponine—was shoved harshly through the treeline.  She landed on her knees, her hands flat on the ground and her skirt torn, and she tensed like something hungry and wild.  The man that stepped out after her could only be her father, with the build of a once-handsome man gone to seed and a face that, so close to Éponine’s, was unarguably related to her.  Jondrette’s own daughter, an earthbender with a conscience.  It must have been killing him, Grantaire thought, muffling a snicker.  “You should be proud of yourself,” he told Grantaire.  “Somehow you convinced this worthless girl to try to defend your secret.  Fortunately, I have more committed followers who mentioned that a grizzly wolf had been seen outside of town.  Extreme measures had to be taken to encourage her honesty.”

“Let Gavroche go,” Éponine demanded.  Her voice trembled, but she raised her chin and glared up at her father.  “You _said_ you’d let him go if you found him.”  She jerked her head at Grantaire, her hands clenched so tightly he wouldn’t be surprised if there was blood trickling from her palms. 

“Claquesous,” Jondrette said, sounding almost bored, and another man appeared out of the trees like a ghost, Gavroche bundled up in his arms like a particularly violent parcel.  The man’s grip was well-executed, Grantaire noted, and in combination with the neatly tied gag the kid wasn’t likely to get anywhere.  “Let him go.”

Grantaire had to admire the kid’s spirit.  The second he was on the ground, Gavroche ripped the gag out of his mouth, spat on Claquesous’ boot, and delivered a sharp stomp to his foot as he darted to Éponine.  She caught him with a huff and rose, hands clenched on his shoulders as she tugged him backward.

Her eyes met Grantaire’s for a moment, over her brother’s ruffled hair, and they were dark with apology.  His lips quirked up, and he inclined his head minutely.

She had someone to protect.  Grantaire would have abandoned a stranger in a heartbeat, too.

They vanished into the darkening shadows, Éponine’s arm tight and defensive around her brother’s shoulders, and Jondrette turned back to the travelers.

“Now, Avatar,” he said, and Grantaire felt his lip curl.

Fuck it, this was a lost cause anyway, he might as well.  “I have a _name_ , you know, and it’s not ‘Avatar.’”

“Maybe so,” Jondrette said, disinterested, “but there isn’t a king’s ransom being offered for a name.  It’s for the Avatar, alive.  Not necessarily unharmed.”  He clapped his hands twice.

It _rained_ figures in dark clothing, and things turned violent.

He wanted to be surprised, Grantaire reflected as he caught the nearest body and flipped it over his hip, a ruthless street fighting move that ended with a sick _pop_ as their shoulder dislocated.  He really did.  He slammed a knee into the body’s face and dropped them, unconscious, on the forest floor.

Breath in, out, move.

Grantaire struck out at the next dark figure he saw, advancing a sharp step and throwing out a hand in a palm strike.  Flames burst from his skin, licking through the air in a bright lance, and caught on the first piece of cloth they encountered.  His target dropped with a scream, one of his comrades following him down in an attempt to put out the flames.

There was a brief lull in the activity, a silent breath.  Firebending, since the rise of the Fire Nation some five decades prior, was a unique terror to those facing it in combat.  Grantaire didn’t mind it, found it easier than the scraps of airbending he’d picked up, but he wasn’t above using it to intimidate.

The arrogance of superior numbers took over almost at once, though, and the fighting swelled again.  He caught a glimpse of Joly and Bousset, fighting with their backs to one another.  Bousset, as he’d suspected, was a dab hand with his spear.  It spun in a wicked arc, the blunt end used as a bludgeon in addition to the bladed head.  Water whirled around Joly’s hands, lashing out to drive Jondrette’s fighters into Bousset’s range—it was clearly a practiced move.  Somewhere, he could hear Briseis snarling, and the wet tearing sound of her teeth in flesh.  It was a terrible noise, but grounding, something as familiar in this fight as in a hundred others before.

It was the vanishing of that sound that tipped Grantaire off that something was seriously, acutely wrong.

Grantaire spun on his heel, the flames he was wielding spinning out of control as he released them, and searched out the last place he had seen Briseis.

She had held her own well, as she always did, a hurricane of claws and sinew, and there were dead and unconscious men scattered liberally around her.  Someone, a tall man so thin and scraped that Grantaire imagined he could see the last of the waning daylight through his bones, had managed to slide through the chaos with…

A rope, Grantaire realized, feeling ice wash through his veins, and a long knife.  The former was twisted around Briseis’ lower jaw, dragging her head down to the ground in a cruel grip.

The latter was pressed, sharp tip to skin, beneath her left eye.

There was no breath in or out this time.  There was only Grantaire, bright and cold and white, and gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah...I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of cliffhangers in this, I'm really sorry, y'all. The next chapter will include the fallout of causing the Avatar to flip his shit, and will probably run longer.
> 
> Also, on orders from ThoseWhoFavorFire, this is my plug for my other Les Mis story, [the good left undone](http://archiveofourown.org/series/489316), which is, at the moment, some 13K of my love letter to Eponine and Grantaire. Plot is also underway for that. There is a theme emerging. You can come talk to me/request a short ficlet/cuss me out for the cliffhangers at [words-writ-in-starlight](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com).
> 
> Oh, also! The first person to guess my nerdy-ass Classical joke with Briseis gets an imaginary cookie and...fuck, I dunno. Bragging rights.


	4. acting out all their fears

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Avatar state has aftermath.
> 
> A lot of aftermath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO it's been about ten days and I'm very sorry, y'all, but this is still a much more regular updating schedule than I've ever had in my entire life. I've also written more fanfic in the last two weeks than, like, maybe ever. My series [the good left undone](http://archiveofourown.org/series/489316) now has a second part, and I'm going to be posting a Hamilton fic in the immediate future because, as I believe I've addressed, my beloved [ThoseWhoFavorFire](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ThoseWhoFavorFire/pseuds/ThoseWhoFavorFire) is a filthy enabler. Title's from Icarus by Bastille.
> 
> Anyway: hark, a chapter! Here be angst.

Grantaire came back to himself in fragments, senses clearing one at a time.  The sound of people breathing, hard and fast and scared, the feeling of the ground beneath his feet, the taste of fire on his tongue and in the air.  Vision was always the last to come, as he blinked away the white light in his eyes and felt the exhaustion slam into him.  He wavered on his feet for a moment before he gave up on standing altogether and dropped to his knees, shaking hand braced against the ground.

The clearing was a disaster area, a blast radius.  The ground was scored with deep cracks, marked with char in places.  Two trees had been brought down, one of them on Jondrette, and there was evidence that several more had been struck with fire.  It hadn’t been very long since Grantaire lost his grip, the sun not yet gone, and the clearing was still lit red and gold with dusk, as if the air remembered the glow of the flames.

The thin man who had held the knife to Briseis’ eye was under the second tree, one arm thrown out and his eyes wide and staring.  He was dead.

On further examination, there were a lot of dead people in the clearing.

Grantaire dropped his head and pressed one hand against the headache starting behind his forehead, trying to repress the surge of nausea. 

“Well,” Joly’s voice said from somewhere behind him, doing a remarkably good impression of blithe cheer.  “That was exciting.”

Grantaire didn’t need to look up to sense Briseis approaching him, putting out a hand blindly and feeling it sink into her ruff.  She nosed at his face—he could feel the streak of blood she left—and he mumbled something incoherent under his breath, just enough to let her know he was conscious and at least tangentially functional.  He did look up then, carefully cradling her massive head between his hands, and brushed a thumb beneath her left eye.  There was a small prick to the eyelid, barely visible through her fur, but her eye was clear and intact, steady on his face.  He reached up to tangle his hand into her ruff again.  A small shudder traveled through the powerful shoulders under his hand and he tightened his grip, letting her pull him gracelessly to his feet again.  It took him a moment to muster the willpower to speak.

“I guess we were due, Bris,” he murmured as he tried to remember how to be stable on his feet again.  She rumbled amiably under his hand, but didn’t twist around to nuzzle him again, which he appreciated given his uneasy footing and the amount of blood smeared across her jaw.

“What _was_ that?” Bousset asked, and Grantaire could _hear_ how wide his eyes were.  Explaining seemed like entirely too much to deal with, and instead he pressed his forehead to the jut of Briseis’ shoulder blade.

Another voice broke the silence.  “That was the Avatar state, wasn’t it,” Éponine said flatly, and Grantaire took a moment to collect himself before he raised his head, released Briseis, and stood as straight as he could.  She and Gavroche emerged from the trees again, covered with dust and debris and smudged with soot as if they had failed to get outside of the danger zone before Grantaire lost his grip on things.  Her eyes flickered to Jondrette, beneath the massive weight of the tree, and hardened.  “Don’t lie.”

Lying hadn’t occurred to Grantaire.  The Avatar state was unmistakable.  He nodded, and she nodded in return, slow and considering.

“It’s a shame you didn’t get all of them,” she said at last.

“Didn’t he?” Joly asked, picking his way over from where he and Bousset had evidently taken shelter behind a large boulder.  “That seemed pretty—uh—comprehensive.”

“Montparnasse managed to get away, he’s a sneaky little shit,” Éponine said, although her voice held remarkably little in the way of enmity.  “Claquesous.  Looks like you got Babet, though,” she added, eyeing the thin man under the tree.  Grantaire’s hand twitched out toward Briseis before he pulled it back to his side.

“A few others passed us too,” Gavroche said, bright-eyed and cheerful as he sidled around a man half-sunk into a crack in the ground.  It was a little disturbing how at ease he seemed, Grantaire thought vaguely.  But then Gavroche seemed the type to be at ease no matter what.  “Are we going back to see if they’re at headquarters?” he asked, slanting a look up at Éponine, and her lips pulled back in a snarl.

“No we’re _not_ ,” she said.  “We’re leaving town, and they can choke on it for all I care.  If they come after us I’ll…I don’t know.  Figure something out.”

“Can we go with you?” Gavroche asked Grantaire, and Joly and Bousset seemed braced for Grantaire to put up a fight.

Grantaire wasn’t in the mood.

“Sure,” he muttered, scrubbing a hand down over his face.  He was exhausted, and the nausea was getting stronger, turning into the bone-deep sick feeling he expected.  He needed sleep and a strong drink, in whichever order they became available to him.  “Do whatever you want.  Your odds of dying horribly are probably lower if you head for the other side of the continent, but if you’re determined, I don’t care as long as you keep up.  Briseis, down.”

She sank down until she was stretched on her belly, as low as she could press herself so that Grantaire could half-fall onto her back.  Walking long distances was beyond him, and probably would be until he got some sleep—he would be lucky if he could stay on his feet much longer.  That didn’t change the fact, though, that the lot of them had just cut their way through a vast majority of Jondrette’s gang, including the man himself, and revealed the Avatar in dramatic fashion.  They _needed_ to put distance between them and the town, whether Grantaire was able to do it or not. 

“Bris,” he said once he was relatively secure on her back, and when he tapped her shoulder with one hand, she stood, careful not to unseat him.  She was always careful with him, afterward, nosing at him rather than nipping, resting her head in his lap rather than bowling him over.  He looked down at the others, feeling the headache worsen and the sickness deepen, and his voice was short when he spoke.  “If you’re coming, let’s go.”

They looked around at each other, and he didn’t look back to see if they were following him.

They made good time, given the circumstances, quite a distance from the town by the time Éponine stopped and announced, in the tone of someone who expected the world to conform to her demands, “Gav’s dead on his feet, and you’re going to fall off that enormous monster you call a pet and break your neck and then we’ll have a lot of explaining to do.  We’re stopping here.  There’s a town about a mile south, medium-large, regular army posting, that’s why Jondrette turned it down.”

Grantaire didn’t have the energy to fight her on it and shrugged, apathetic.  An army posting was less than ideal, but at the moment nothing seemed ideal, and the bitterest part of his mind pointed out that at least he knew how to deal with the army.  He let Éponine bull her way through the forest, Gavroche in tow, until she stopped apparently at random and said, “We can stay here.”

“Fine,” Grantaire said, disinterested, and she nodded firmly before folding herself up tidily on the ground.  Gavroche lay down beside her, Joly and Bousset laying out their bedrolls and claiming spots of their own.  Grantaire slid down Briseis’ shoulder and didn’t even try to land on his feet, falling into a crumpled heap on the earth.  Briseis lay down beside him with a huff, prodding at his arm with her damp muzzle, washed clean of blood the first time they passed a stream.  He let her settle her head on his chest, the rest of her body pressed up close to his, and closed his eyes.

The exhaustion dragged him down between breaths, inexorable as a riptide pulling him under water, as drowning, and he slept.

* * *

Grantaire was trapped inside his own body, like an insect in amber, trying to force his hands to drop and his feet to move.  It was useless, useless, he was _useless_.  The white light blazed around him, shimmering off his skin, filling his vision, swallowing him up and leaving him stuck behind a thick pane of glass.  His body moved, dragged on the elements around him, pulled him along, and the men in front of him fell, and fell, and fell.

There were always more.

They were always falling, under the white light, under stones and fire and wind and water, under, under, under…

There was blood on his hands and blood on the ground and blood in his mouth and—

Grantaire lurched awake, the nausea stronger than ever and crawling up his throat.  He rolled blindly to his feet and stumbled away from the others, feeling tremors shake down his spine so strongly he could barely keep his feet.  Feeling his foot catch on something, he landed on his knees, hands braced against the ground as he fought the urge to be sick.

He knew he was going to lose, because he always lost, but it was still a shock.  When it was over, or rather when there was nothing left in his system to be thrown up, he couldn’t breathe around the bands of tension in his chest.  He was shaking so hard that all he could do was slide back and curl up with his back to a tree, arms wrapped around his knees and his head pressed into them as he tried to drag in a deep breath.  It felt like dying, suffocating under the weight of everything, with nothing to do for it except survive. 

Grantaire didn’t know how long he had been there when a hand touched his shoulder.  He threw a hand out, automatic and dangerous, and caught the person in the chest, forcing them away.

“Grantaire?” Joly asked, sounding alarmed.  “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” Grantaire forced himself to say.  His voice was a wreck.  He wouldn’t have believed himself either, but when Joly came closer the bands tightened around his chest again, until he was dizzy with lack of air.  Joly, he told himself sternly, this was Joly, Joly who told stupid jokes about waterbending and played I Spy with Bousset for three hours straight once, Joly who was as harmless as it got, Joly who would be so, so easy to hurt.  He could feel his pulse ratchet up.  “Please don’t,” he whispered, voice raw, when Joly reached out toward his shoulder again.  There was a lethal growl as Briseis pushed through the undergrowth, her shadow falling over Grantaire where he was sitting on the ground.  Joly froze.  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Grantaire,” a new voice said.  Éponine, he thought vaguely.  “Joly, back off,” she said, and Grantaire gasped in a shallow, shaking breath as the other man did as he was told.

“What’s going on?” Joly asked her, sharp.  “Is he sick?”

“No,” she said, lowering herself to the ground off to the side, where Grantaire could see her but not reach her.  “He’s not.  I know what I’m doing.  You should go.”

Joly stiffened and glared at her.  “I’m a _healer_ , I should--”

“I’m a street kid,” Éponine shot back.  “So I think I hold the expertise in dealing with someone potentially violent.  Get lost.”  She softened a little when he looked back at Grantaire and added, “It’ll be okay.  Just go, and keep the others away.”

Joly looked skeptical, but retreated slowly.

Éponine waited until he was gone to look back at Grantaire.  “Okay,” she said, voice as calm as he’d heard her—calmer, really, quiet and steady.  “You don’t want me to get close?”  Grantaire took a moment to process the sentence and shook his head slowly.  “That’s fine, I’m okay here.  Briseis is behind you on the right, you know that, right?”  He nodded.  “Are you going to hurt either of us?”

Grantaire dragged in a breath, a sharp pain traveling through his chest as he did, and managed to force his voice to cooperate again.  “I don’t want to,” he said again.  “I wouldn’t hurt Bris,” he added, like an afterthought, and he heard Briseis rumble behind him.

“But if I get too close you might hurt me?” Éponine said, still calm, still steady.  He nodded, closing his eyes and knocking his head back against the tree at his back.  He did it again, wishing that it would clear his thoughts.  “Stop that,” she said, voice going stern, and he rested his head back against the tree.  “I’m going to stay here, all right?  I’m not going to make you hurt me.  Can you take a deep breath?”

He did.  It sounded like tearing paper and hurt like a knife, but his head spun minutely less, and he forced himself to take another, clenching his fists until his short nails cut into his palms.

“Good,” Éponine said.  “Another.”  He did.  “Really good.  Is this a standard part of the Avatar thing?”

The ragged laugh that bubbled out of his lips was a ravaged sound, humorless.  “No,” Grantaire bit out.  “It’s a standard part of the ‘Grantaire is useless’ thing.”

“So you’re not suffering some kind of backlash from the Avatar state?” she asked, steady, steady.  She had to be exhausted, he thought, he shouldn’t be keeping her up.  “I can get Joly if you think it would help.”

“No,” he said again, and she waited patiently until he added, “To both.”

“Do you mind if I ask what’s wrong?”

His hands were still shaking, even with the tendons standing out on the back of his fists.  “Why do you care?” he asked venomously, half-snarled through his abused throat.  The words spilled out of him like bile, like a flash flood, out of his control and distant from him, as if it was someone else speaking.  “Because I’m the _Avatar_?  Because you want me to save the world?  Because you want me to be a—a _weapon_ to protect you?  It’s sure as hell not because of _me_ , you don’t even know me, and if you did you wouldn’t care, because I’m shit at being the Avatar and I’m shit at everything else because that’s all I’m _for_.  You don’t care and you _shouldn’t_ care and there’s no reason for you to give a single fuck what’s wrong, so _why are you here_?”

Éponine sat there and let him rant, with the look of someone letting him get it out of his system.  How unfortunate for her, he thought bitterly.  There was more to get out of his system than he would ever be able to say before his voice gave out from overuse.

She waited until it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything, and then said, apparently out of nowhere, “You know, when I was thirteen I found out my brother had been sold.  Gavroche,” she added, and Grantaire looked at her.  “Jondrette and our mother, they traded him for, what, a few gold pieces, back when our name was Thenardier.  They blew all the money, of course, but I figured out that Gavroche had ended up in the area after we came here.  So I went out to find Gav, because I didn’t like the thought of him alone on the streets, and when I found him he’d been caught picking someone’s pocket.  The guy was going to kill him.”  She trailed off and picked at her skirt, at a place where the seam was slightly bunched with overdrawn thread.  When she spoke again, her voice was hard.  “So I dropped a building on him.”

Grantaire blinked at her.  “What’s your point.”

“I don’t know you,” she admitted freely.  “All I know about you is that you don’t like to kill but you’ll do it if you have to, that you love your friends and Briseis, and that you let me near you while you were sleeping, which means that either you trust me, you really trust yourself, or you’re suicidal.  Possibly some really fucked up combination of the three.  Now you know that the first time I killed someone, I was thirteen, that I’d do anything for my brother, and that I’m shit at thinking things through.  We’re even.  If you don’t want to talk, that’s fine, I can sit here until you’re all right.  If you do want to talk, now we can start from equal footing.”

Grantaire stared, head tilted to the side as if a different angle would help him understand.  “That is some of the most convoluted logic I’ve ever heard.”

“You should spend more time around criminals, then.  Your breathing is a little better.”

It was, he noticed.  The knot of anxiety was still there, like a weight on his chest, but his ribs didn’t hurt when he inhaled, and his hands weren’t shaking as much.  The worst was, for the moment, over.

“I don’t want to talk,” he said at last, and Éponine nodded.  She rearranged herself until she was leaning against a tree facing him, legs tucked up under her skirt.

“So, are you okay?” she asked, and Grantaire laughed again, as humorless as before.

“No,” he said.  “I don’t think I’ve been okay for…a long time.”  A lifetime, he corrected internally, and strangled a slightly more hysterical laugh before it could escape.

“Join the club,” Éponine said, oddly chipper.  “But I meant more immediately.  Are you going to be sick again?”

Grantaire took a deep breath, held it, and let it out, trying to assess himself.  “No,” he decided finally.  Briseis settled onto her belly behind him, nosing anxiously around his sweat-damp curls and making a mindless croon deep in her throat, as if he was a child in need of soothing.

Éponine visibly stifled a yawn.  “I’m guessing sleep is out of the question.”

“It’s all right,” Grantaire murmured, letting Briseis push her head into his lap and force his legs away from his chest.  She draped as much of her shoulders would fit across him, her massive paws with their wicked nails draped over one of his thighs.  Her weight was steadying, settling.  “I’m used to it.  You can sleep.”

“I’m _going_ to sleep,” Éponine said, her sharp tone at odds with the drowsy drift of her eyelids.  “Right here.”

Grantaire paused.  “I’m not—I’m fine.  I’m not dangerous to any of you.”

“I don’t imagine you are.”

“Then why--”

Her eyes snapped open, shining feral in the bright moonlight.  “Because I feel like it and, hey, you could have killed me earlier and you didn’t, and you could have killed me in the Avatar state and you didn’t, and you probably could even have killed me and taken your money by force and you didn’t do that either, so I figure if you’re going to knife me in my sleep, you’re more committed to the lie than anyone I’ve ever met.  And that,” she added, letting her eyes close again, “is saying something.  I don’t exactly trust you, but I’m pretty sure you’re not interested in killing me.”

“But,” Grantaire said, “you can’t be comfortable like that.”

Éponine snorted and shimmied pointedly, eyes still closed.  “We’re sleeping on the road, moron, no one’s comfortable.  Now shhhh, I’m sleeping.”

“Éponine.”

“Sleeping,” she repeated.  “Can’t hear you.  Try back later.”

Grantaire went quiet, stroking his fingers through Briseis’ ruff and feeling the bellows of her ribs press against his legs with every breath.  From the sound of it, Éponine really had gone to sleep, although he knew now that she slept lightly enough to be woken by any noise.  He was vaguely flattered that she was willing to sleep near him, although he noticed that she’d kept Gavroche away.

Éponine asleep a few feet away and his heartbeat finally starting to slow, Grantaire settled in to wait for dawn.

This was always the part he hated, almost as much as he hated the immediate terror of waking up from a nightmare.  Sitting and waiting, with nothing to do, fighting the exhaustion dragging at him with every breath—it was some form of hell, he was sure of it.  When he and Briseis were traveling alone, they would push on when he was like this, walking until either his muscles hurt too much to keep going or until even Briseis’ prodigious stamina started to flag.  He couldn’t drag the others along, though, and they had demonstrated that if he tried to leave they would cheerfully stalk him as far as necessary.  So it was sitting, and it was waiting.

He counted up to a thousand by ones, by twos, by threes, by fives.  He tried to do sevens, but he’d never been much good at math.  Once he’d burned through that option, he switched to reciting the ingredients of every kind of paint he could think of, then to running through every song he’d learned in his life, starting with the cradle songs he had known before he would speak and working his way through the increasingly crude ones he’d picked up as he got older and more widely traveled.

By the time the sun rose, he was about to crawl out of his skin.  As soon as the sky went from pink to gold-streaked blue, he was on his feet, Briseis at his shoulder and Éponine waking nearby.

“Are we leaving?” she asked.

“The farther we get from the village, the better,” Grantaire muttered.  “The Avatar state is distinctive, and--”  He half-laughed.  “I’m sure someone, somewhere, has drawn a decent sketch of me.”

Éponine nodded, pulling herself upright and shaking out her skirt until she looked less like she’d spent the night leaning against a tree.  “Are you good to march all day, or will you need to ride again?” she asked, brisk, as if she had dealt with his failures all her life.

“I’ll walk,” Grantaire said, looking away.  “If I get tired, Briseis will take me.”

“Good.  I’ll go collect my brother and your Water Tribe friends,” she announced.  “You can have a couple minutes to make sure you’re all right.”

Grantaire paused for a long moment, frowning at her in bemusement.  “Thanks,” he said at last, and she gave him a businesslike nod before she strode away.  She walked like a woman at war—well, Grantaire supposed she was, supposed they all were since the Fire Nation began expanding its influence, but Éponine moved like a soldier.  It was in the set of her shoulders and the determined way she planted her feet, in the everpresent downturn of her lips and the stern spark of her eyes.  It should have unnerved him, set him bitterly on edge with the memories, but instead it was stabilizing, like bedrock.

He wasn’t sure if he trusted her just yet, but he thought he might be able to learn.

Rejoining the others on the way back to the road, Grantaire wasn’t surprised when Joly’s immediate response was to rush over and flutter over him anxiously.

“R, are you all right?  Did you manage to get back to sleep?  You look exhausted, is there anything I can do?”

“I’m fine, Joly,” he said quietly.  “Just tired.  It’ll pass.”

Bousset stepped forward and reached out to rest a hand on Grantaire’s shoulder.  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Grantaire mustered up the best smile he could manage.  Éponine looked skeptical—all of them did, and after the night before he didn’t blame them—but he’d always been good at faking ease with conviction.  “As good as ever.”

“If you say so,” Bousset said, dubious.

“I _do_ say so,” Grantaire said, firm.  “Now come on.  The farther we get, the better.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, y'all, thanks for reading! And thank you so much to everyone who's been sweet enough to leave me a comment, it's been great and helps remind me that I have actual people waiting on the next chapter, which motivates me to write more. It's a nice quid pro quo sort of deal.
> 
> If you want to leave a comment with the comfort of the anon button, or you just want to come shout at me on another medium, hit me up at [words-writ-in-starlight](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/ask) on Tumblr. I also take requests if you're in the mood for a short ficlet and want to drop me a prompt, although I'll admit you have about a fifty-fifty shot of fluff versus soul-crushing angst.
> 
> (Oh, and yes, Montparnasse lives, he makes the decision that prudence really is the better part of valor and leaves town almost as enthusiastically as they do, just in the opposite direction. Because Montparnasse is many things and stupid is not one of them.)


	5. drink yourself to death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Recovery, or something like it, and a few new acquaintances.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has been two weeks, I am so sorry, y'all. Work has been killing me, I just did not have the wherewithal to write stuff, the other Les Mis fic is behind too. BUT, here it is! It ain't happy, because it's Grantaire, but it's here. Title is from [Icarus](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bastille/icarus.html) by Bastille.

Whatever level of success Grantaire had managed at convincing the others that he was fine evaporated by the next night, after another attempt at sleep and another nightmare that woke him retching and panicked.  Éponine woke again, this time with her brother, and sat silently with Grantaire until he had stopped shaking.

“You’re not fine,” Gavroche said as they took to the road the next morning, his usually laughing face serious.  Grantaire didn’t answer him except to look down with a slightly rictus grin, and Gavroche nodded.  “Okay.”

“Okay?” Grantaire repeated, and Gavroche made a derisive sound in his throat.

“If you know you’re not fine and we know you’re not fine, we can work around that.”

Grantaire paused for a long moment, feeling his smile fade—probably for the best—and considering that remark.  He mentally matched it against Éponine’s arithmetic of trust and said, “You’re a weird kid.”

“Mm-hm,” Gavroche said brightly, and bounded on ahead, leaving Grantaire behind him.

It went like that for three days as they walked to the outskirts of another large and army-free village, Grantaire dazed with exhaustion, the others quiet around him with Éponine taking point.  Gavroche started walking beside him, a small bright presence opposite Briseis’ soothing bulk, and gently tapping the back of his hand when they needed him to focus.  Otherwise they let him walk in silence, guided by the hand twined in Briseis’ fur, half asleep with the bitter taste of self-loathing on the back of his tongue.

It was only temporary, Grantaire had told himself the first time he caught himself scraping his blunt fingernails down one arm hard enough to leave four parallel scratches.  It was just until they were safely away, and then he could find a tavern where he could drink enough to sleep without dreams, maybe even enough to drown out the disgust in the pit of his stomach so that his skin would be livable.

Grantaire felt a little guilty for slipping away into town pre-dawn, leaving the others asleep on the ground.  The others would doubtless be worried about him getting into more trouble and Briseis would ill-tempered about being left behind, but he couldn’t _breathe_ under the weight of the nightmares, and he knew his black mood was rubbing off.  Even Joly, who he’d thought would be upbeat even at the end of the world, had been tense and anxious, one eye on Grantaire as if keeping an eye out for disaster.

The point was, guilty or not, he left, in the hideously small hours of the morning, when even edgy Éponine was deeply asleep beside Gavroche.  He ordered Briseis to stay with them and she blinked piteously at him, but didn’t stop him or make noise to wake the others to do it.

It took him a while to walk into the town from their camp in the forest, both because they had opted for safety in distance and because he hadn’t been able to force himself to eat a full meal in three days.  The sleep deprivation, too, was making his head spin, every blink forcing him to relearn where the horizon was and threatening to cast him into darkness.  Given the situation, and the fact that blacking out in the woods wouldn’t help anyone, he went slowly.  The sun was just finishing its rise, the lower curve still kissing the edge of the earth, when he reached the town square and settled in to wait.

There was a trick to getting food and other things without money, and it was all about making oneself useful.  So he sat and waited until the large tavern fronting the town square showed signs of life, then walked up and tried to look exhausted.  It wasn’t exactly a stretch.

“I need work,” Grantaire said baldly, too worn to be diplomatic.  “Anything you’ve got.”

“Can’t pay,” the owner said—snapped, really.  She was a broad-shouldered woman with close-cropped steely hair and a friendly face currently pinched with strain.  Her expression softened for a moment and she added, “Sorry.”

“I’m fine with being paid in food or wine,” Grantaire offered.  That got her attention at once, as it did in every town.  “What do you need done?”

She eyed him, taking him his visible exhaustion and pallor, then shook her head, starting to turn away.  “Unless you can miraculously unclog a blocked well, kid, there’s no work for you here.”

Grantaire managed a weary grin at that.  “Actually,” he started, and she turned back.  “How about I take a look at that well for you, and we can discus payment after?”

“Kid,” she said seriously, and Grantaire just couldn’t muster the energy to bring up the fact that he was _twenty-four_ and hadn’t been a kid…ever, maybe, except in body.  Correcting her seemed like unfathomably complex work, demanding far more energy than he had at his disposal.  “If you can fix my well so we’ve got clean water again,” she gestured toward the tavern behind her, “you can eat whatever you want.”

“And wine?” he said, expectant.

“Sure, just don’t get drunk on the good stuff,” she said, leading him around the side of the building and laughing as though he had suggested something riotously funny.  Grantaire didn’t say anything and allowed himself to be led.

The well in question was narrow, a little wider than his shoulders and, as these things tended to go, the problem had started out simple and worsened as people tried to fix it.  It seemed like some of the large stones forming the raised lip of the well had been knocked down, until the channel was too crowded with wreckage for a normal repair attempt.  Trying to drag the stones out with rope or something similar would risk destabilizing the rest of the wall and bringing the whole mess crashing down.

“Yeah,” Grantaire said after a few moments’ examination, and saw the tavern owner’s eyebrows shoot up in shock when he continued, “I can have this cleared by midday.  You were serious about payment?”

“You clear this, I’ll put you up in the inn on the house as long as you’re here, room and board both.  _And_ wine,” she said.  She gave him a skeptical once-over and said, “Not to be rude, but what are you planning to do?  You an earthbender or something?  Because you don’t look like much.”

Her bluntness was almost refreshing, Grantaire had to admit.  In any case, he didn’t have it in him to be insulted—he probably looked like he could barely be relied on to stay upright, let alone shift a heavy pile of rock.  He sighed and said, “Yeah, I’m an earthbender.”  Sort of.  She still looked a little dubious, but didn’t seem inclined to question him, leaving him it as she went back inside to finish opening the tavern.

Unclogging the well wasn’t difficult work, only delicate, a matter of ensuring that whichever stone he wanted to raise was unhindered by the others around it.  It demanded a little more concentration than he might have liked in his current state, but it was perfectly doable.  He’d done worse in less functional states for less motivation.  He had a headache by the time he lifted the last stone out and moved it into place, from the work and the sun and the exhaustion, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.  The stones were still rickety, he noted, and he thought about it for a moment before he sighed and shifted back into a bending stance.

Breath in, breath out.  Move.

He felt for the layer of strong clay just under the dirt and stepped forward, letting his weight drop heavily into the ground.  Ropes of the thick red soil burst from the ground and started to burrow into the spaces between the stones, until the ring was shored up to his satisfaction.  As Grantaire lowered his hands, there was the soft grinding sound of the stones settling, the clay shifting minutely as it started to dry.

It was noon, the well as clear, and Grantaire was completely drained.  His body was reminding him emphatically that he couldn’t run on sheer willpower forever, that he needed food or sleep or both immediately if he wanted to stay on his feet.  He had to steady himself on the doorjamb of the tavern as he walked inside, and the tavern owner glanced at him in surprise.

“It’s clear,” he said, tired.  “You can check if you want.”

“No,” she said, startled.  “I believe you.  C’mon in, kid.  You got a name?”

“R,” he said.  “You can call me R.”

He didn’t want to risk being sick again, so he split the difference on the question of food by requesting something light and plain, just a couple pieces of bread, warm and fresh.  The owner of the tavern was only too happy to hand them over, along with an entire bottle of wine and a room key, as he walked to the table in the corner farthest from the door.  He liked this woman’s style, he decided as he sat, facing the door in deference to the low hum of paranoid anxiety that always got so much worse when he was like this.  She didn’t ask too many questions, she had no desire to look a gift ostrich-horse in the mouth—definitely his preference for tavern owners.  He offered her a half-ironic salute with the bottle of wine before he drank.

Grantaire had been there an hour, maybe two, and had worked his way through a goodly portion of the first bottle when a familiar figure appeared in the door and swept over to him unerringly.

“R,” Éponine said as she sat, and he wondered in a distant, tipsy sort of way where she had learned his preferred pseudonym.  Her tone was even, lacking in judgement but just tense enough to make it clear that she was upset.  He didn’t blame her, frankly, he must have been a terrible traveling companion at the best of times, on top of his more serious failings.

“Éponine,” he said quietly.  “Tell me, is managing my problems a hobby of yours?”

She considered him for a moment, then said, “We were worried.  I convinced the others to stay in the woods, though.”

“Don’t worry,” Grantaire said, taking another drink of wine.  “I’m not getting into any trouble.”

“No, because drinking wine by the bottle isn’t troubling at all,” she said dryly, reaching out to flick a fingernail against the green glass.  She hit it just right at the empty upper portion and the glass clinked brightly.  “Why are you here, R?”

Trailing a finger up the neck of the bottle and giving her a broad, slightly manic smile, he remarked, “Why, Éponine, I would have thought that was obvious.  I’m doing damage control, of course.  So that you don’t have to deal with it anymore.”  He could actually taste the guilt on the back of his tongue, palpable, sick and copper-sour, for forcing her to sit with him every night while he shook and swallowed down the urge to vomit.  Éponine had her brother to take care of, not to mention herself, and the last thing she needed was a disastrously failed Avatar putting claims on her time.

Éponine frowned.  “R, a few nights of broken sleep aren’t going to kill me, I don’t mind getting up to sit with you.  Hells,” she said with a short laugh, “it’s not like my dreams are all that sweet either, I’d probably be waking up anyway--”  She stopped as he shook his head sharply.

“You shouldn’t _need_ to,” he said.  “I know what I’m doing.”  Maybe if he said it enough he’d believe it.

“Do you?”

He didn’t answer her question, looking at the spot of refracted light shimmering in the shadow of the wine bottle.  “Tell the others they don’t need to worry—if anything goes wrong, I’ll make sure they’re not involved.”

“You’re going to do this no matter what we say, aren’t you,” she said, observing him with a sharp glint in her eye.

“This is what works,” Grantaire said.  “I’ve tried everything, and this works.”

Éponine nodded, slow and thoughtful, and said, “Okay.”

“What?” he asked, blinking at her.

“I’ll keep the others out of trouble.  Here’s the deal,” she said.  “You get two days--”

“Four,” he said automatically, too busy feeling stunned by her response to process what she was telling him.

“—four days,” she corrected without missing a beat.  “We’ll still be in the forest, don’t get stabbed.”  She nodded firmly and held him in her steady black stare until he slowly inclined his head in agreement, and she stood.  “I’ll leave you to it, then.  Oh, and R,” she said, looking down at him.  “Maybe we were worried that _you_ were going to get hurt, not that you were going to get _us_ hurt.  Did you ever consider that?”

She left without giving him a chance to answer, and he stared after her for a long moment before shaking his head and taking another drink.  The wine washed through his mind like snow over a battlefield, leaving a layer just thick enough to hide the damage, and when he had finished the bottle, a significant portion of a second, and his two slices of bread, he was tipsy enough that sleep seemed manageable.

The tavern owner, spirits bless her, didn’t question him and offered him a fresh bottle without a word as he started toward the stairs that would take him up to the inn overhead.  He liked that woman quite a lot, he decided as he found the room noted on the tag attached to his heavy room key. 

He tumbled onto the bed, setting the bottle on the floor beside him, and let himself slip out of consciousness.

He woke…later.  It took him a long moment to recall where he was, how he had come to be there, and another to figure out the time.  The sun was past fully risen—again—which meant he’d probably managed to sleep some fourteen hours, enough to blunt the edge of the physical and psychic drain of the Avatar state followed by three sleepless nights.  His head ached mildly when he moved, and he was still so tired he could feel it press down on him like a weight, but he hadn’t woken with panic choking him at all and he was prepared to take the victory.  Considering the idea of food cautiously, he was pleased to find that it didn’t make his stomach lurch quite as viciously as it had, although he wouldn’t have an appetite for a day or two yet.

When he went downstairs, the tavern owner provided him with a small loaf of her excellent bread and some cheese, in addition to two apples and a questioning eyebrow.

“Sleep well, R?”

“Better than I have,” he admitted.  He probably didn’t look much better, but she nodded.

“The well’s flowing clear as diamonds,” she said.  “So if you need anything else, you let me know.”

He nodded and took his food back upstairs, sitting down on the bed with his back to the wall and the wine bottle propped against his thigh.

Drinking so early was a poor idea, but as the hangover faded and left him properly clearheaded for the first time since their clash with Jondrette’s gang, the twisting guilt seeped back in.  It was a pervasive thing, the memories of the wreckage of Patron-Minette tangling with the older ones of coming back to himself in courtyards and training arenas with the knowledge that he had killed soldiers whose only crime had been trying to protect their country.  He was a failed weapon, a hiltless knife that was as likely to turn on the wielder as on the target, and it was worse still because all the effort in the world hadn’t helped him control the rampant power of the Avatar state.  It was _possible_ , according to all the stories, according to his teachers and to the General—Grantaire just wasn’t good enough.  He was the worst possible candidate for the Avatar, just a vessel to hold the power away from the next part of the cycle.

The wine helped numb the pain, at least, much as he should be past feeling it after all these years of being so consistently incapable.  He finished the half-empty bottle and quietly filched another one from the tavern owner, who pretended not to see, and by the time dinner rolled around he was working his way past sincerely drunk.  A quiet knock on the door heralded the tavern owner, who firmly pressed a bowl of soup onto him along with another small loaf of bread.

“I’m sorry,” he said, then shook his head.  That was the wrong courtesy, wasn’t it, that was why she was giving him that look.  His brain-to-mouth filter broke down like a grate in a flood when he was drunk, leaving him prone to saying whatever thought surfaced first.  An apology was always a ready fallback, but right now…  “Thank you.”

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,” the tavern owner said, serious.  Her eyes swept over his face and he looked away, automatic.  “Listen, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said, offering a smile.  “Just tired.  Really,” he added when she looked dubious. 

“Whatever you say, R,” she said, and left without pressing for more information.

Grantaire’s system of recovery after the Avatar state was simple, direct, and dependent on a large quantity of alcohol.  It was the only way he had found to numb the guilt and terror for long enough to let it recede into the back of his mind, like the tide going out after a tsunami and leaving the wreckage.  So he drank until it plunged him into sleep, and woke bitterly hungover until he started drinking again, eating when he remembered to or when the tavern owner came and forced a meal onto him.

He could hear the voice of the general in the back of his mind, telling him to pull himself together, to be stronger than shattering every time he used the Avatar state—or was used by the Avatar state, he thought bitterly.  To be _better_.

The wine made the voice quiet, would keep making the voice quiet, until he was strong enough to ignore it on his own.

Some time on the third day, which was always the worst, the lowest point of this nightmare cycle, it occurred to him that he should count his blessings that none of the past Avatars ever decided to join the chorus reprimanding him.  His two immediate predecessors didn’t live long enough to have a chance at being proper Avatars either, although they had better potential.  The one before them, though, the one who died at the start of the war, Roku—he would have every right to be angry with Grantaire. 

It was a shame he couldn’t just hand his body back over and let the old firebender deal with everything.

But it was what it was, and that meant it was Grantaire’s problem to fix.  So on the fourth day, as he’d agreed with Éponine, he got up and gritted his teeth against the hangover and made use of the now-functional well to have a cold and unpleasant wash.  His curls pushed back out of his face and dripping chilly water down the nape of his neck, he reclaimed his seat in the back corner of the tavern and started re-acclimating to human presence. 

That didn’t mean giving up the soothing buffer of the wine just yet, but it was progress.  He was only sort of drunk by dinner, which was even more progress.

The tavern was doing good business, every table occupied, the tavern owner and her minions bustling about like a hive of bees.  The walls glowed warm with the firelight and the red-gold sun pouring in at shallow angles, voices rising and falling in the familiar tide-flow of a crowded room.  No matter how long Grantaire spent in the forest with only a few people, or alone in an inn, it was always easy to fall back into the steady surge, like letting a current sweep him away.

Grantaire had the luxury of blending in with the crowd, alone at his back table, for some five hours before things started their predictable decline again.  This time, it was precipitated by a man in a red coat—not Fire Nation red, but scarlet as fresh blood, the sort of color that commanded attention without fail.  Stepping into the tavern, a pulse of silence rippled out around him as heads turned and conversations paused.  Grantaire considered trying to disappear, make himself small enough to be overlooked, but then the man in the red coat swept a glance over the room, and Grantaire’s thought process clattered to a sudden halt.

It was entirely possible that Grantaire had never seen such a beautiful human being in his life.  In fact, he was prepared to gamble confidently that he had never seen someone to rival this man in all his lives.  Blond hair was unusual in the extreme, the bright gold spill trailing down from the man’s queue even more so.  His face was narrow and finely drawn, like an artist’s interpretation of a spirit of fire and passion, lips thin and firm, cheekbones high and delicate.  Dark eyes gleamed like embers in the light, gently angled in the way of the Fire Nation, and stern as steel.

Grantaire’s fingers itched to draw him, to detail the way the shadows fell beneath his sharp jaw and into the hollow of his throat.  In color, perhaps, to capture the way the gold curls escaping to hang around his face flattered the saffron-touched tan of his skin.  He wished he’d been able to learn to paint, paints would be the perfect way to catch him.

He was unearthly, he was beautiful, he was—coming toward Grantaire.  Marvelous, Grantaire thought irritably, realizing abruptly that his corner table was the only one with multiple open seats.  The man in the red coat strode toward him, flanked on either side by men in what looked like half-dismantled—but well-disguised—Earth Kingdom army uniforms.  Even better.

“Would you mind if we sat here?” the man in the red coat asked, and his voice was warm and rich, the kind of voice meant for speaking to a crowd or reciting poetry.

It took Grantaire a moment to pull his thoughts together enough to speak—it was half a miracle that his jaw wasn’t slack.  “Um, sure, make yourselves comfortable, I guess,” he said, gesturing with the bottle in his hand.

The gold-haired man gave the bottle a look, but schooled his face into a polite smile as he sat down, his two Earth Kingdom companions on either side.  Grantaire pushed a hand back through his hair, drying in wild coils, and tried to look as unassuming and dissolute as possible.

“What’s your name?” one of the soldiers asked, a friendly smile on his face.

“R,” he said, offering a nod.

“Oh, that’s how it’s going to be?” the soldier asked, his smile broadening.  He had a cheerful face with a pointed chin and laughing eyes, made for grinning, the sort of face that won friends as easily as breathing.  “Well, then, I’m Courf, and this is Ferre.”  He gestured broadly to the other soldier, whose face was longer, more serious, with hair cropped short on the sides and a look in his eye as if he was studying the world around him in excruciating detail.  “And this is E.”

“It’s a pleasure,” the man in the red coat said, nodding like a nobleman acknowledging a commoner.  The fine manners suited him.  “Are you a traveler as well, or do you live in town?”

“Just passing through,” Grantaire said, and E’s gaze sharpened with interest.

“Really?  Did you happen to come down the northwest road, through the forest?”

“Yes,” Grantaire said, wary.  “Any particular reason?”

“E’s on a crusade,” Courf said with an amused roll of his eyes, and Grantaire grinned briefly as he brought the bottle to his lips.  “To find the missing Avatar.”

It was only through the grace of some benevolent spirit that Grantaire hadn’t taken a sip yet, or the sharp breath of surprise would have made him choke.  He set the bottle down with a loud thud and demanded, “ _Why_?”

E’s eyes flared and he leaned forward, bracing his elbows on the table and almost glowing with passion as he spoke.  The light of the candles gleamed off buttons at his collar and cuffs—gold, real gold, where the buttons down the front of his coat were rough-carved wood.  “What the Fire Nation is doing is  _wrong_ , the Fire Lord has to be stopped and the only way to do that is to force him off the throne.  The Avatar could help, if we could find him.  Courf and Ferre have contacts, they said that the Avatar was found in a town a few days from here, do you know anything?”

A laugh, sharp-edged and hard, spilled out of Grantaire’s mouth.  “Even if you  _could_ hunt him down, how do you even know the Avatar would be able to help you?  From what I’ve heard, this one’s pretty useless—at everything except running away.”

“I have to try,” E said, fierce and bright as light glinting off steel.  “I can’t let this happen.”

“ _Let_  this happen?” Grantaire asked, another laugh bubbling out.  “This has  _been_  happening for fifty years!  What part of history do you plan to change, Your Highness?”  He jerked his chin at the elegant gold buttons and E scowled, tucking his wrists to hide the buttons. 

“At least I’m doing  _something_ ,” he snapped.  “Rather than sitting in a corner and drinking myself to death.”

Grantaire raised his bottle in a toast, and took a swallow of wine—it tasted bitter, more so than it had before.  “As you say,” he said, dry.  “Were you planning to eat something?”

“Were you planning to tell us if you knew anything about the Avatar?” Ferre asked, speaking for the first time, voice steady and inescapable, and Grantaire took a deep breath, letting it out in a slow sigh.

“I’m sure your information was good,” he said, looking down at the table.  “But you’d be better served to give it up.  Even if he wanted to help you, he wouldn’t be able to.  Dead useless.”  He looked up and saw the three of them watching him in surprise.  “Even drunk drifters hear things,” he added with a tight smile.  “And there’s not a lot to hear about the Avatar, so it goes around pretty quickly.  I’m surprised my traveling companions and I didn’t run into the army moving north as we came down the road—which, I’m sure, you three would be  _perfectly_  comfortable with.”

“Perceptive, for a drunk,” E said, somehow managing to look down his nose at Grantaire despite sitting on eye-level.  It was strangely exhilarating to be the object of all that intensity, like standing in the heat of a bonfire.

“Rude, for a marble statue,” Grantaire shot back.

There was a long silence, tension wound tight in the air, before Courf coughed and said, “So, you said something about food, R?”

Grantaire dragged his attention away from the golden-haired stranger with what felt like a massive effort, and nodded.  “The soup’s good.  So’s the bread.”  He tipped both head and bottle toward the tavern owner, ruling over her domain with the gimlet eye of a practiced commander.  “She’ll let you make arrangements if you don’t have money.”

“We have money,” E muttered, and produced a handful of coins from a pocket.  “Ferre, would you mind?”  Ferre nodded, taking the coins and standing, and once he was gone E glanced down at the ground.  “Come here,” he added to what appeared to be nothing at all, and a small creature with red-brown fur and an intelligent face pulled itself onto the table.

“Fire ferret,” Courf told Grantaire, as if imparting a secret.  “She’s a bit picky about people, but she follows E  _everywhere_ , don’t be offended if she doesn’t like you—and watch for the teeth,” he added, grimacing reminiscently.

“She’s lovely,” Grantaire said, masking a grin as he reached out automatically and touched the bottle-brush tail, fur stiff under his palm.  She whirled around, black eyes alight in the white mask, and flashed small, sharp teeth at him.

“Careful, seriously,” Courf said, alarmed, but Grantaire ignored him, offering his hand to the fire ferret and making a low noise in his throat, an absent, tuneless hum.  The teeth vanished almost at once, and she nosed into his palm, inquisitive.  He tore off a bit of his remaining bread and offered it to her, and she took it, dainty.

“I have a way with animals,” Grantaire said with a shrug, stroking a thumb down her throat to scratch at the curve of her chest and earning a grumble of pleasure.  E looked almost offended by her betrayal—beautifully so, to be sure, Grantaire noted, but still offended.  It wasn’t Grantaire’s fault that most animals that could be tamed were fond of the Avatar, but it was a perk of the position.  The only one, as far as he could tell.  “I’d ask her name, but you probably won’t tell me, right?”

“Right,” Ferre started to say, sliding three bowls onto the table with the grace and dexterity of a lifelong busboy. 

“Patria,” Courf said.  “Come on, how much trouble can we get into with that?” he protested to the sharp looks his companions shot him.

Ferre narrowed his eyes, but looked back to Grantaire.  “She likes you, though, I thought she only liked E.”

“I’m extremely charming,” Grantaire said, perfectly straightfaced, and Courf snickered before he fell on his food with enthusiasm.  Grantaire left them to their dinner, nudging his wine bottle aside to let the fire ferret come closer, feeding her the last bits of his bread and burying his hands in her silken coat until he felt something tight and tense crack loose in his chest.  She crooned happily as he rubbed at the soft skin beneath her jaw, and he blinked, blindsided momentarily by missing Briseis.  That was good, he told himself once the wave had receded; if he was missing Briseis, reaching for their bond again, that meant he’d managed to put himself back together somewhat.  The fire ferret chattered at him reprovingly and he started petting her again, letting the steady slide of her fur scrub away the ache of longing.

The three men were almost done—Courf was just cleaning out the last bit of broth from his bowl, having blown through his meal in no time flat, while E had table manners just as impeccable as his speech and still had some to go—when the door opened again to admit a handful of armored figures.

Grantaire looked up from the fire ferret, his hands going still as the hubbub of the room dropped off to a low level chatter of anxiety.

Courf closed his eyes.  “Shit,” he mumbled.  “Don’t tell me.” 

“Gentlemen,” Grantaire murmured.  “Remind me which army you’re running from.”

“Both,” E said, hands pressed flat against the table as if holding himself in place by force of will.  “Lately the Earth Kingdom.”

“Ah,” Grantaire said, managing to sound serene.  “Well.  We’re all terribly unlucky people, then.”

The Earth Kingdom captain swept a look across the room, eyes lingering dangerously on the back corner.  “We apologize for interrupting your evening,” he said, directing his words at the tavern owner.  “We’ve been tracking a pair of deserters and an escaped prisoner.  Have any of you seen them?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, there we go! I hope you guys enjoyed it! I'm hopeful that the next chapter will get out in a more timely fashion, but unfortunately I can't make any promises. However, if you want to come shout with me at [words-writ-in-starlight](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com) on Tumblr, that might expedite things.


	6. found yourself a path upon the ground

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *grovels intensely*
> 
> RIGHT, so it's been, what, three months? I am so sorry, guys, good God. But please rest assured that I don't abandon works. I don't have a lot of time these days (I'm in my senior year of college and I have a thesis to write, a novel to write, and a novel to edit, Polaris and Falls the Shadow respectively for those of you following me on Tumblr, on top of a full class load, my duties as the only organic chemistry tutor, my job as the anatomy TA, and ADHD that makes focusing...interesting), but I don't plan to abandon this. It's just going to be a long damn time between chapters, probably, and intermittent at best. 
> 
> That being said, I'm so far beyond flattered that people like it, and no one has ever groveled more intensely than me. If you've stuck with me despite the delay, I love you, you're a doll, and if you're just finding this now, please consider this groveling in advance of the next inevitable delay.

Grantaire kept his face serene, but E, with his back to the door, tensed, like a drawn bow.  His hand closed into a fist on the table, and Courf and Ferre at his sides had the pointedly still look of soldiers about to burst into motion.  Grantaire curled his fingers into the warm fur of the fire ferret under his hands, and the animal was frozen, the ruff at the nape of her neck bristling at the nerves singing through the room.

“We haven’t had any soldiers in here,” the tavern owner said, brusque.  “Not in weeks.”

“You might not have recognized them,” the captain said.  “They might have acquired new clothes, altered their uniforms somehow.  It doesn’t matter—it’s the prisoner we want.”

Grantaire let his eyes drag over E, dressed in his bright red coat with its fine golden buttons—not Earth Kingdom make, not designed for their high stone cities and farms.  The man was stiff, an almost desperate look on his delicately drawn face, eyes unfocused as if seeing something not there.  The future perhaps, a future of chains and bars, of being trapped.  Grantaire knew the look.  It was hard to conscience letting it remain on E’s face.

“Ah, hells,” he muttered, and stood up, dropping the fire ferret on the table.  He raked a hand through his curls and picked up the half-empty wine bottle, and started for the soldiers ranged just inside the door.  He let each step rock a little, as if he was sincerely intoxicated, and gave them a look with wide, vacant eyes.  “He-ey,” he said, coming to a halt in front of them.  The captain gave him a deeply disdainful look, and Grantaire ignored it, trying to set his feet without losing the dissolute sway of a drunk.

“What,” the captain said flatly.

“Are those your, uh, your ostrich-horses out there?” Grantaire asked, feeling the words drip as slowly as syrup, thick and heavy.  He gestured with the bottle at the half-dozen ostrich-horses idle in the square beyond the door, and the soldiers didn’t look back, keeping their attention on him.

“Yes,” the captain said, as if he was talking to a young child, or a particularly slow one.  “What do you want, drunkard?”

“Wanted to check you knew they were running for it,” Grantaire said, solemn as a child, and made a gesture.  It looked vague and distracted, a quick jerk of his hand toward the animals, but the cobbled earth shivered almost imperceptibly.  Ostrich-horses were skittish, though, and an earthquake that a human would barely notice sent them into a riot of panic, screeching and fighting past each other to flee.

The chaos made the soldiers whip around and their neat formation broke like glass, the captain dashing outside and shouting orders.  The square descended into madness and Grantaire silently nudged the door shut, then looked at the tavern owner.

“Do you have a back door?” he asked, and she arched her brows at him, but nodded, gesturing toward the kitchens.  He definitely liked her, he thought fervently.  “Great.  I don’t really want to be here when they get back.  Thanks for everything—what’s your name?”

“Hucheloupe,” she said.  “Madame Hucheloupe.”

“Right,” he said.  “Thank you.”  He slipped past her and paused at the table in the back corner, resting his hand on it.  “Were you three planning to try your luck with the army?” he asked blandly, and E gave him a skeptical look.

“Weren’t you the one who said we couldn’t change anything?”

Courf tossed an elbow into E’s ribs, and Ferre’s hand closed sharply over his arm.  “I don’t think his political values are the point right now,” Ferre said repressively, using his grip to drag E to his feet through main force.

“Yeah,” Courf agreed, rising in one smooth motion to stand beside Grantaire.  He gave Grantaire a friendly nudge and a grin, and added, “I don’t think we’re going to get a better offer, either.”

“Fair enough,” E said, and picked up the fire ferret, letting her settle around his shoulders as the four of them filed through the kitchens and out the back door into the alley.

“You’re not as drunk as you let us believe, are you?” Courf asked as Grantaire led them through the small rear courtyard with the well and past the blank back walls of a handful of buildings. 

Grantaire glanced back at him, listening to the ongoing clamor in the main square and trying to judge how much success the soldiers were having.  Instead of answering, he took another pointed drink from the bottle and said, “Here, turn back toward the forest.”

“Why did you help us?” E demanded, and Grantaire shrugged without looking back.

“Like Courf said.  I didn’t see you getting better offers.”

“Who are you?” E pressed, taking a few long-legged steps until he was at Grantaire’s side—Grantaire realized in surprise that, if he straightened up, he had almost a handspan of height on the other man, that E’s long-limbed appearance didn’t translate directly into towering over everyone around him.  “You could have given us up--”

“And if you don’t shut up, you’re going to give us _away_ ,” Grantaire hissed, and E closed his mouth, glowering.  His eyes were that peculiar tawny gold-brown that said _firebender_ , up close, and Grantaire wondered vaguely exactly what he’d saved from the Earth Kingdom today.  He’d probably made worse mistakes than rescuing a firebender.  “Ancestors,” Grantaire muttered, exasperated, and led them further from the town square, toward the forest where Briseis and the others would be waiting. 

They managed silence all the way to the treeline, the clamor of the Earth Kingdom soldiers fading away as they got their rampant ostrich-horses back under control.  Under the cool shade of the trees, Grantaire came to a halt, turning back to them at last.

“I’m going to rejoin my group,” he said, voice as flat as he could make it.  “I’d recommend not traveling toward where you heard word about the Avatar.  It’ll be swarmed with soldiers by now, I’d imagine.”

“Just because _you_ would rather be safe in a tavern than try to do anything doesn’t mean you should write off this whole situation as no concern of yours.”

Grantaire blinked at E for a moment before, helplessly, he started to laugh.  The muffle giggle turned into gasping, teary-eyed shaking as he leaned against a tree and snickered, the now-empty bottle of wine slipping from his hand to crack on the ground.  He wasn’t sure if his laughter was genuine, or remotely appropriate, but he couldn’t choke it down.  E looked torn between anger and concern for his well-being.

“It’s my concern,” Grantaire finally managed to get out.  “It’s _so_ my concern that I’m on the run from the Fire Nation.”

“Thought that might be it,” Courf said brightly, and Grantaire levered himself off the tree to stand upright again.  “Takes one to know one and all that,” he continued, blithe, and turned to look at E seriously. 

“He might have a point about the army,” Ferre said, quiet and calm.

E scowled, and even with his lips pressed thin and his forehead furrowed into deep lines Grantaire was struck by how perfectly formed his features were, how much his anger looked like a painting or a sculpture or—if it wasn’t too blasphemous for him to think it—like one of Grantaire’s rare visions of the spirit world.  E would fit there, he thought, with his amber skin and wild golden hair and eyes like live coals.

Then E sighed, and Grantaire could _see_ him capitulate to his friends’ logic.  “Would you mind if we traveled with you for a few days?” he asked, and he did a good impression of graceful surrender even if his eyes still glittered with the fight.

“No,” Grantaire said, still gasping weakly as he started walking again, pushing deeper into the forest.  “As long as you don’t mind not getting your answers.”

“Then you’re not getting any either,” E snapped, and Grantaire waved a disinterested hand.

“You’re on the run from the Earth Kingdom and the Fire Nation, and that’s good enough for me, Your Highness,” he said, and E made an angry hissing noise.

“Don’t _call_ me that, I’m not your prince,” he snapped, and Grantaire raised his eyebrows.

“You could have fooled me, tossing out orders like that,” Grantaire said, taking care to make his voice as bland as possible.  He turned deeper into the forest and called back, “Follow me, Your Highness.”

The woods were dark with shadow as they wound their way back to where Grantaire recalled the camp to be—his recollection was perhaps a little clouded, but he had more faith in Briseis than he’d ever had in himself and he wasn’t concerned.  Once they reached a familiar patch of high blackberry canes, smothering their way down the roadside, he stopped, and tilted his head, listening.

“Briseis, to me!” he called, and there was a wavering howl in response, the cry of a hunting predator—a grizzly wolf’s howl was deep enough to vibrate the bones of a listener, unnerving and often enough to send a grown soldier running for the safety of a crowd.  His new allies all went stiff, drifting toward each other as Briseis crashed through the underbrush toward them, and Grantaire smiled. 

She burst out of the trees into the small clearing he had stopped in, her thick silver fur tangled with branches and leaves.  He stood, still smiling, as she darted up to him and cuffed him with one paw, hard enough to send him to the ground.  It hurt, but she had the courtesy to keep her claws sheathed, so he was prepared to let it go.  She dropped the heavy paw on his chest, sharp enough to make him breathless, and buried her muzzle in his throat, snuffling him over thoroughly to ensure that he had returned intact.  Then she grumbled deep in her throat, dissatisfied with his absence and the scent of alcohol.  Nipping him sharply on the edge of his jaw, she rolled a reproachful eye at him until he reached up to wind his fingers into the stiff ruff around her neck.

“Sorry,” he said quietly, and she huffed, disdainful, but removed the paw holding him to the ground.  Her attention shifted—one eye was still on him, with an air of long-suffering exasperation, but the other had turned to the three men accompanying him.  He twisted to see that Courf and Ferre had both whipped out weapons, a pair of long knives and a wickedly curved sword respectively, and E looked entirely prepared to fight bare-handed if it was required of him. 

“I’ll be very offended if you kill her,” Grantaire drawled from where he was still sprawled on the ground, and E’s gaze snapped down to him.

“Offended?  That thing almost killed you!”

“Nah,” Grantaire said.  “Pretty sure she got that out of her system as a pup.  Bris, help me up.”  She huffed again, but when he had tightened both hands in her ruff, she bore him to his feet with a bored look, and awarded him a nuzzle.  Sitting down next to him, Briseis nosed through his hair as if checking for injuries, tail tucked primly around her feet.  “Come on,” he said, grinning in amusement at his three new companions.  “This is Briseis.  Bris, this is E, Courf, and Ferre.  They’re friends.”  She examined them skeptically, and clearly wrote them off as not worth her time, returning to her close inspection of Grantaire.  “Don’t take it personally,” he said.  “She hardly likes anyone.”

“That,” Courf said, sounding almost faint.  He let his knives drop to his sides.  “Is that.”

“That’s a grizzly wolf,” Ferre finished for him, sword still at the ready and eyes narrowed dangerously.  “They’re maneaters.  They can’t be _tamed_.”

“Briseis and I are a special circumstance,” Grantaire said, waving a hand.  “Take us back to the others, Bris.”

“And the…maneater thing?” Courf asked.

“Briseis has never in her life killed someone just to eat them,” Grantaire said firmly.  “Bris.”  She didn’t move, staring at him, and he sighed.  “Fine.  Down.”  She dropped to the ground and he slid neatly onto her back, just behind the powerful swell of her shoulders.  Briseis stood, as light and cheery as a pup, and started trotting away from the road, Grantaire on her back and the three men trailing behind them in mute shock.

“I really am sorry,” Grantaire murmured to Briseis, and she rumbled, soothing.  For all that he had been able to pull himself together to evade the Earth Kingdom, now that he was supported by Briseis’ strong back, the beat of her heart steady under his left leg, he was remembering that he always felt a little fragile at the end of one of these spirals.  It was easy and familiar to let Briseis carry him along, though, and he sank his hands into her fur, closing his eyes.  She was a good guide, ensuring that they didn’t pass under any low-handing branches that might have risked hitting him, and the quiet arguing of the three men behind him was too much to consider just then.  He ignored them, and opened his eyes when he heard a louder voice—a woman, and she sounded aggravated.  Not quite angry, but definitely getting there.

“Briseis!  You mongrel, where did you get off to?”

“Well, that’s just rude,” Grantaire said, looking down as Briseis shouldered through the last of the underbrush into the campsite.  The others looked up and started to their feet, smiling.  “I can’t believe she likes you.”

“You’re back,” she said, neutral.  “And I don’t think she likes me.”

Briseis grinned, baring all her wicked teeth, and prowled up to Eponine, who stared her down.  When Briseis swept her tongue up her cheek, Eponine looked almost flattered.

“I brought company,” Grantaire said.  “Not sure who they are.  We haven’t exactly…swapped life stories, if you get me.  But they’re on the run from the Earth Kingdom and the Fire Nation both, so.”

“They’re practically family,” Gavroche said, bouncing up beside his sister.  He eyed Briseis and looked up at Grantaire.  “Do you think I could get her to let me ride her?”

“I doubt it,” Grantaire said, sliding down her shoulder to the ground.  “But you could ride double with me.”

“Awesome,” Gavroche said, delighted, and Grantaire grinned a little.

“Absolutely not,” Eponine said.  Then she cracked a smile too, adding, “Maybe make friends with the giant murderbeast first, kid.”

“Briseis isn’t a murderbeast,” Gavroche said, reaching out boldly to stroke what he could reach of her throat, which Briseis permitted, and Eponine shook her head wryly.

Grantaire opened his mouth to say something—he hadn’t quite decided if he was defending Briseis’ honor as a gentle giant or her skill as a fighter—but he was cut off by a lanky form that collided with him hard enough to knock his lungs empty of air for the second time in an hour.  He froze for a moment, his instincts reaching for his bending to fight back, before he recognized Joly and hesitantly returned the hug.

“We were worried about you, you _jackass_!” Joly said, voice muffled in Grantaire’s shoulder and tunic.  “What the hell were you thinking, just disappearing like that?  We thought Eponine was going to come back and tell us that you were _dead_ or something!”

“I’m fine,” Grantaire said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.  He patted Joly on the shoulder and it seemed to comfort the healer, so he did it again.  “See?  Got all my limbs and everything.”

“Your bar is way too low,” Bousset said.  Joly released Grantaire except for a firm grip on his shoulders and scowled at him, the expression sitting strangely on his cheerful features.  “Having all your limbs should be the baseline.”

“And so should not running off in the middle of the night!” Joly cried, and gave Grantaire a shake.  He was remarkably strong for someone build on such skinny lines, Grantaire thought absently as his head snapped back and forth.

“Technically it was morning.”  Joly shook him again, less sharply, and Grantaire grabbed his wrists to steady himself.  “I’m sorry,” Grantaire said once Joly had stopped shaking him.  “Okay?”

“Fine,” Joly said, and dropped Grantaire’s shoulders with a huff, trying to scowl at him again.  The scowl broke up almost immediately, like mist before high noon sunlight, and he smiled.  “We missed you.”

“You…?”

Bousset, bless his soul, was courteous enough to cut in rather than letting Grantaire’s unfinished sentence dangle.  “Who are your friends?” he asked, looking over Grantaire’s shoulder to the three men behind him.

“Ah,” Grantaire said.  “Right.”  He turned and beckoned them forward.  “This is Courf, and that’s Ferre.  They’re deserters.  And that’s E.  He’s Fire Nation, but they’re on the run from them too.  Sounds like they’ve been busy.”

“Hi,” Courf said, flashing his charming smile.  “We met R in the tavern and he was nice enough to smuggle us out of town before the Earth Kingdom army caught up with us.”

E stepped forward, past his companions, and Patria, draped around his shoulders like a fur ruff, raised her head, black-pearl eyes fixed warily on Briseis.  “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Anyone being hunted by the Fire Nation is a friend of mine,” Eponine said, polite, but her hand landed on Gavroche’s shoulder and tugged him minutely back into her hip.  “Where were you three headed?”

“North,” Grantaire said with a flicker of grim humor.  “E’s looking for the Avatar.”

Bousset’s head snapped up and he gave Grantaire a look.  Grantaire kept his face flat, impassive, and Bousset said, “Um.  I think if the Avatar’s been avoiding two armies for so long, you three would need to get really, really lucky in order to find him.”

“Right,” Joly agreed, gripping Bousset’s arm.  His voice was tight, a little higher than usual, but it didn’t shake.  “So you probably don’t want us around.  Bousset’s bad luck is contagious, I swear.  R, were we heading out again?”

“Yeah,” Grantaire said, weary.  “You three are going to want to tack south before you head north again.  The army might think to canvas the forest once they realize what we did.”

“We’ll come with you, if you don’t mind,” E said, his amber eyes fixing on Grantaire.  Patria flowed off his shoulder and down to the ground like water, creeping toward Briseis cautiously.  “Just for a day or two before we head north again.”

“Wonderful,” Grantaire sighed.  He swept a glance over E again, studying the fine red coat with its mismatched gold and wood buttons.  There was something off about it—what kind of fugitive would escape with a coat worth a month’s living expenses?  His eyes rose to meet E’s, and Grantaire ignored the jolt that shuddered down his spine, an echo of his first speechless shock at seeing E walk through the tavern door.  E stared back at him, jaw set sharply, as if determined to look right through Grantaire’s skin and rummage through his head for his secrets.

On the ground, Patria crept closer to Briseis, barely feet away now.  The grizzly wolf looked down, lips curling back from her sharp white teeth, and she snarled as she swatted a paw at the fire ferret.  Patria bared her own teeth in her much-smaller muzzle and stood her ground, and Briseis lowered her head, hackles bristling.  The threat was too much for Patria, reminded that things Briseis’ size could easily eat her and still be hungry for more, and she squeaked, bolting back to E’s feet.

“Just wonderful,” Grantaire repeated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *hides face in hands* I'm not even giving you guys a long chapter, I'm terrible. 
> 
> *crawls into trash can*
> 
> *tosses out slip of paper* My Tumblr is [words-writ-in-starlight](words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com) if you're interested, and my tag for my (rather copious) Tumblr fic is [#moran writes stuff](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/tagged/moran-writes-stuff). I do tend to write more Tumblr fic than long-fic just because it demands less focus and brainpower, soooo...shoot me a prompt if you're really dying for me to write more X-Men or Les Mis or what have you.


	7. i'm haunted by your ancient history

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaand once again it's been like two and a half months, because I am the worst. However, I _am_ currently on winter break, so it's my (tentative) hope to bang out the next chapter before I go back to school at the end of the month. To those of you who've stuck it out, I LOVE YOU MORE THAN WORDS CAN SAY. To those of you who've just now shown up, feel free to take this apology in advance of the next inevitably interminable delay.

Moving out to the south with E’s small crew added to their own was tense, a humming air of unease between the two parties.  Courf covered it up with charm and smiles, but Ferre and E were intensely, openly suspicious, and Éponine eyed the lot of them like a cornered wolf watching a hunter.  Joly and Bousset were friendly, but reserved and careful, taking Grantaire’s lead.  It didn’t help that Briseis took another swipe at Patria that sent the ferret skittering back to E’s shoulders, where she rode, muttering and peering out at them.  Grantaire did his level best to ignore it—as far as he was concerned, traveling with anyone at all was still strange.  This was just another step up on the oddity scale.

“R,” Gavroche said, bounding along beside him the morning after they’d reunited and started south again—the first day had been spent in near-silence, devoted to the need to get as far away as possible.  Grantaire’s stride was much longer than his, but not quite enough that Gavroche needed to jog to keep up, so he traveled with a little skip every few paces that kept him at Grantaire’s shoulder.  “Did you mean it about being able to ride Briseis?”

“I’m not the boss of her,” Grantaire said with a shrug.  “If she likes you well enough, you could probably ride double with me.  It’s only happened with one person, though, and that was under some protest.”

“Who was it before?”

“An old friend,” Grantaire sighed.  “Kid, isn’t your sister worried about you?”

Gavroche smiled, skipping ahead and cutting around Grantaire to pet at Briseis’ throat again.  She put her ears back, but didn’t growl or show her teeth, taking on her best long-suffering look again until Gavroche resumed his place on Grantaire’s other side.  “Ep says that if you were gonna kill us all, you’d have done it when I robbed you blind.  How’d you know I was trying to pick your pockets?”

“Um,” Grantaire said, glancing over his shoulder.  Éponine was at the rear of their little column, watching the backs of the newcomers in front of her with a dark glint in her eye.  Courf seemed to be upholding a courteous bout of small talk with Joly, who was smiling and gesturing less broadly than usual, one eye on Grantaire in the lead.  “Natural talent, kid.”

“Oh,” Gavroche said, nodding sagely.  “I get it.”  Grantaire had the uneasy feeling that the boy did, in fact, get it.  “So, R,” he said, and Grantaire looked down again.  “How’d you tame Briseis without getting eaten?  Ep says grizzly wolves are, like, the most deadly thing around except maybe the Fire Lord.”

“You weren’t this talkative before,” Grantaire observed.

Gavroche shrugged.  “I can be polite, you were the walking dead.  Now you’re not, so you’re doomed.”

That dragged a grin out of Grantaire.  It felt crooked and unfamiliar across his face, but good, warm, like Briseis’ fur under his fingers and Joly and Bousset laughing at his criticisms of Fire Nation artists.

“Make sure to say nice things about me at my funeral, kid.”

“You can call me Gav.”

“Gav, then,” Grantaire said tentatively, and the warm feeling flooded through his chest again when Gavroche grinned, gap-toothed, up at him.  “And um, Bris was abandoned by her mom.  I don’t know if she died or just wandered off or what, but I found Briseis outside the—place I lived as a pup, when I was about six.”  Grantaire hoped that his near slip hadn’t been too obvious, or that E and his partners in fugitivism were too far back to pay attention.  “She was halfway dead from starvation—grizzly wolf pups don’t have the stamina to hunt much of anything big—so I sort of smuggled her in.  She almost bit these three fingers off before we came to some kind of understanding,” he added, holding up the last three fingers on his left hand.

“Wait, seriously?” Gavroche asked, wide-eyed, and grabbed Grantaire’s hand by the wrist to look at it more closely.  Grantaire obligingly twisted the hand to show the scars on his palm.  The bite hadn’t been deep enough to require elaborate healing, but it had revealed Grantaire’s project to the general.  The only reason he’d been allowed to attempt his (admittedly insane) plan to care for and tame her was because he’d outright refused any other animal companion they’d tried to force on him.

Animal companions said a lot about their Avatars.  There had been some serious concerns about Grantaire’s chosen spirit guide.

“It took almost a year for her to really like me,” Grantaire said.  “But we got over the biting phase pretty quick.”

“How?” Gavroche asked, seeming carefully not awestruck.  Grantaire suspected that Gavroche took pains to never be awestruck by anyone or anything.

Grantaire reclaimed his hand and offered Gavroche a small grin as Briseis ducked her head to nibble delicately at the three fingers she’d almost taken off as a pup.  “I got tired of being a chew toy for something half my size and bit back.”

Gavroche burst into delighted cackles and darted off toward the back of the column, doubtless to tell Éponine the story.  Grantaire waited for the immediate burst of anxious strain in his chest, at the thought of someone sharing knowledge about him, but only a faint echo of it appeared.  Sometime since meeting her and being handed in to save her brother, he’d come to trust Éponine not to screw him over again, or at least not in this way.  If it was a toss-up between his freedom and Gavroche’s life, he’d frankly be disappointed in her if she chose the former, but she hadn’t used his panicked uselessness against him, and she’d given him the time he needed to pull himself together in the tavern.  It was a rare gift.  He could stand to let her know the story of how his foolish child-self had almost lost a hand to a grief-mad pup.

“I do appreciate that I didn’t lose anything too important saving your sorry hide,” Grantaire informed Briseis, and she snorted, shaking her head and making her whole pelt tremble.

“No wonder your bar for things going well is keeping all your limbs,” Bousset called from a few paces behind him.  “How did you even live this long?”

Grantaire twisted to look back again, just in time to see Bousset catch the butt of his spear in a hidden pothole and nearly topple straight onto his face.  Joly grabbed him by the arm and Ferre’s arm snapped out to catch the back of his tunic, the pair of them setting him carefully back on his feet.  “I could ask you the same thing,” Grantaire said, amused.  “How did you get kicked out of the North Pole again?”

“Uh, some of a catwalk fell on me,” Bousset admitted, sheepish.  “Like, a lot of catwalk.  And then Joly had to make sure all my bones were back inside skin where they belonged, and my spine was…still spine-shaped.  I like my spine spine-shaped.”

“We all do,” Joly said, solemn.  “I’ve got your back, Bousset.”

“That’s terrible,” Grantaire observed.  “I love it.”

“You were part of the Northern Water Tribe?” E asked with interest, taking a few long strides to catch up with them as his curiosity overrode his skepticism.  Grantaire winced internally—he’d assumed that E’s evident disdain for him would keep a safe distance between them, but no such luck.  “They’ve resisted the Fire Nation for fifty years, I’ve never met someone who’s even been there.”

“Are you so widely traveled then, Your Highness?” Grantaire asked, and earned a glare.  Another burst of heat rippled through his chest, quite a different beast from the pleasant warmth from before—hot and giddy, delighted at being the sole focus of E’s amber eyes.  It probably wasn’t wise to needle him, but Grantaire couldn’t seem to help it.

“Yes,” Joly said, with the odd mix of pride and embarrassment that always surfaced when their home came up.  The Northern Water Tribe was backward, stuck in their ways, according to Joly and Bousset—but on the other hand, they were a great nation, a stronghold against the Fire Nation as proud as Ba Sing Se, in their way.  “Bousset and I lived there all our lives until recently.”

“What’s it like?” E asked, and Grantaire, turning back to Briseis, privately thought that it was the most benign question he’d heard from the gold-and-red fugitive so far.

“Gold and red,” Grantaire murmured to her attentive ear, too quiet for anyone behind him to hear.  “Gold and red, gold and red.  What am I forgetting, Bris?”

Briseis turned to nose around in his hair, and didn’t answer.

* * *

They stopped for a brief midday meal, a combination of whatever could be foraged from the trees around them and the hard tack Joly and Bousset still had in their packs.  It wasn’t much—berries just hitting their ripe season, a handful of miscellaneous other plant matter that Grantaire knew from experience was edible—but it was an opportunity to be off their feet for a while, seated comfortably in the shade rather than pressing on down the road.

Grantaire was eating, watching Patria catch a small squirrel mouse that came too far down its tree and staring absently at E’s back, when it came back to him.  He muffled a yelp and almost toppled over in shock, feeling as if he’d been punched in the chest.

He’d fucking managed it, he realized dazedly.  Twenty-four years as the Avatar and he’d finally, _finally_ managed to find someone from one of his visions.  Red fabric, and gold haloed with sunlight—the arresting combination from his dream, weeks ago now.  He had no idea why it mattered, or what to do with the knowledge, naturally, and one could hardly walk up to a near-stranger and politely ask if they knew why one was having visions of them, but still.  The high of having accomplished something was enough to make him dizzy.

“R?” Joly asked.  “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Grantaire said, and popped the rest of his food in his mouth in order to make all further attempts at conversation pointless.

The buzz of victory didn’t last long, and by the time they’d begun walking again, Grantaire could feel his face settle into a frown.  What was he supposed to _do_ with a vision?  No one had ever told him, and he’d never succeeded in finding the object of one before.  This would be, he thought with a surge of bitter amusement, an opportune moment for one of his past selves to offer insight.

He was so absorbed in wondering if he could maybe find a way to just _ask_ that the hand landing on his shoulder took him completely off guard.  Grantaire spun around, one hand already coming up defensively and the earth shivering underfoot, and came up short when he almost crashed into E. 

“You scared me half to death, Your Highness,” he huffed, lowering his hand and letting his grasp on the earth fade.  “Make noise, would you?”

“I did,” E said, arching an aristocratic eyebrow.  “It’s hardly my fault you didn’t hear me.”

Grantaire frowned at him, but nodded curtly and E stepped up to take Gavroche’s usual place at Grantaire’s side.

“What you did to incur the wrath of the Earth Kingdom?” E asked without preamble.  “You don’t seem the type to…”  He waved a hand vaguely at Courf and Ferre behind them.  “Desert.”

Grantaire repressed a derisive snort, and limited himself to, “You mean I don’t seem like the type to join an army in the first place.”  E didn’t say anything, and Grantaire saw something a little like guilt flicker over his fine-boned face.  “It’s all right, you can say it.  You’re not wrong.  But I did, sort of, and then I left.  It was a while ago, now.”

E walked in silence for another few moments before he said, “I was…unnecessarily harsh with you when we met.”

“Is that an apology, Your Highness?”

“No,” E snapped.  Then he let out a breath, not quite a sigh, and said, “No, wait, yes—hold on, how long ago did you say it was?”

Grantaire blinked for a moment as he struggled to track the subject change.  “Uh, years, quite a few of them.”

“How old were you when you enlisted?”  E looked genuinely taken aback for the first time since they had met.  “You can’t be much older than I am.”

“I was young.  I was conscripted, I didn’t enlist,” Grantaire said, because he wasn’t in the mood to get into it and couldn’t think of a good way to explain the truth.  E looked taken aback, startled, and Grantaire barely managed to keep his lip from curling into a derisive sneer.  He couldn’t hold back the bitter words bubbling up in his throat, spreading a sour taste over his tongue.  “What, you think everyone who joins the army does it over the age of majority, because they’re really _called_ to go out and fight a hopeless war against the Fire Nation?”  He scoffed.  “Please.”

“What the Fire Nation is doing is _wrong_ ,” E said, and his words seemed to almost crackle with passion. 

“The Earth Kingdom army is just a stopgap,” Grantaire said, the hot, sick knot of helpless anger tightening in his stomach again.  “We all know it.  The Fire Nation’s had decades to sink their claws into everything available.”

“You don’t _know--_ ”

Grantaire came to a dead halt, turning on E like a striking snake.  He could hear, distant and tinny, that his voice was rising, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself.  “The Air Nomads were decimated when they were looking for the Avatar at the beginning of the war, it’s only sheer dumb luck the kid got himself killed before they wiped the airbenders out altogether.  And then the Southern Water Tribe was almost annihilated when they were after the Avatar again, and _she_ got killed before she could do anything more than buy a few more of her people’s lives.  Sooner or later, the Fire Nation will find the Avatar from the Earth Kingdom and kill him too, and they’ll have an Avatar of their _very own_ , and _then_ where will the world be?”

He was breathless with shouting when he came back to himself with a jolt.  E, bright with anger, was haloed in sunlight, a spirit of war and fire cut loose from Grantaire’s visions into reality.

“You think the Avatar is that easily manipulated?” he demanded, advancing on Grantaire with a fierce look on his face.  Grantaire dimly noticed that the others had come to a piled-up stop behind them.

“The Avatar is nothing special,” Grantaire snarled.  “And you’re a fool if you think finding him will miraculously save everyone.  If he hasn’t done something by now, I’m—it’s because he’s too useless to help.”

“Or because he’s been too busy being hunted down by everybody and their brother,” Éponine said in a perfectly flat voice.  Both men ignored her.

“Just because _you_ think that it’s a hopeless cause doesn’t mean it is!” E snapped, giving Grantaire a hard poke in the shoulder.  “A drunk and a drifter, a coward who ran from the army, what do you know about war?”

“And who are you, then?” Grantaire demanded.  “A prisoner of the Earth Kingdom with gold buttons on your jacket—a firebender, am I right?  So where did you run from, _Your Highness_?  Some soft nobleman’s life in Capitol City?  This is reality, not a child’s story.”

“You’re right,” E said, his voice dropping from a near-shout to a soft, lethal murmur.  “I’m a firebender.  And if _I_ can see that what my _own people_ are doing is wrong and take a stand against them, what’s _your_ excuse?”

Grantaire pressed his lips together and said nothing. 

E gave a sharp nod, a humorless, triumphant smile on his lips as he turned his back on Grantaire and stormed away, back to Courf and Ferre.  Grantaire’s hands were shaking so hard they ached, and he closed them into tight fists, feeling the edges of his nails dig into his palms until the tremors stopped.  Sick self-loathing and rage crashed against the inside of his ribs like a riptide, threatening to drag him out to sea, and there was still that hot, giddy burn of having all of E’s infinite passion directed at him, high in his chest.  The combination made him cold and dizzy, until he had to lean against Briseis’ immoveable bulk to stay on his feet.

The ground under his feet creaked dangerously, and Grantaire released the tight knots of his fists, one finger at a time.  Pain flared across his palms, sharper and more demanding than the vague ache from before, and he numbly raised them to look at the curves of blood where he’d driven his nails through the skin.  Briseis twisted her head back to nose at his fingers, a near-inaudible whine of distress shivering through her chest.

“Here,” a quiet voice said, and a hand closed around Grantaire’s wrist.  He almost jumped back, yanking himself away from the threat, before he recognized Joly.  Joly drew a long stream of water from his waterskin, letting it pool like liquid silver around his fingers before he brought it down to touch Grantaire’s palm.  “You shouldn’t say things like that,” Joly said, barely a murmur.

“They’re true,” Grantaire said—or thought he said.  His throat didn’t seem quite under his control just now, his gaze fixed on where the cool touch of the water was mending his hand.

“No,” Joly said, and he didn’t seem stubborn, simply…certain, Grantaire thought vaguely.  As if he was stating a fact, and Grantaire would catch up sooner or later.  “They’re not.  Give me your other hand.”  When Grantaire was slow to raise his other palm, Joly reached out to take it himself.  “At least we know he’s a firebender now, though,” he said as he let the water play over Grantaire’s other hand, his voice turning more cheerful.  “That’s good.”

“Yeah,” Grantaire said as Joly released him.  The healing was done, leaving small marks of soft, pink skin in the place of the cuts.  “That’s good.”

Joly leaned up and pressed a kiss to Grantaire’s cheek, and whispered, “You’re not allowed to get yourself killed this time around, you hear me?”

Grantaire tried to muster up a smile, but he didn’t need to see it in order to recognize that it was a faint, wan shadow of a thing.  “I’ll work on it.”

“Good.  We’d miss you.”  Joly sent his water back into his waterskin and brushed off his hands as blithely as if he hadn’t just left Grantaire reeling.  “Now come on, Ep says there’s a town just a couple more hours walk.  We could have real food for dinner.”  Joly nudged him gently with a shoulder, and Grantaire half-stumbled into walking again, lacing one freshly-healed hand into Briseis’ ruff for support.  Joly stayed at his shoulder, and Bousset ambled up until he was a comfortingly solid presence behind them.  Grantaire thought privately that he was probably losing his edge, if he found having someone at his back _comforting_ rather than desperately unnerving.

“So, R,” Bousset said, and he sounded as buoyant as ever.  Whether it was forced or not, Grantaire appreciated it.  “Did Joly and I tell you about the first time someone tried to teach him how to use a spear?”

Grantaire managed another smile, slightly less obviously false, and said, “No, I don’t think we’ve covered that one yet.”

“Bousset, you wouldn’t,” Joly said, clapping a hand to his check in mock horror and betrayal.

“I absolutely would,” Bousset said, bouncing up between them with his spear strapped across his back and a grin on his face.  “All right, so, in the North, boys are trained to use spears young—you know, for hunting.  And so they give Joly the smallest spear they can find and it’s almost a _foot_ taller than him…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *takes a bow* And with that, I shall return to my trash can. 
> 
> You can summon me up out of my trash can on [Tumblr](words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com), and I also have a tag [#moran writes stuff](words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/tagged/moran-writes-stuff) where I put my Tumblr fics, which I write more of because they require less brain power.
> 
> *slams lid of trash can*


	8. fill this silence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grantaire and E get into another fight, and Eponine despairs of them both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I bet y'all motherfuckers thought I was being overly optimistic when I said this wasn't abandoned, huh.
> 
> Not only is there a new chapter NOW and another brief one to be posted next week, but cha'boy went back and edited this bitch for continuity. What the fuck is UP.

The town was right where Éponine promised it would be, nestled into the foothills of the mountains.  A broad area of cleared trees marked the mouth of a mine, which she claimed sourced a coal vein that the Fire Nation used to power their ships—or had, until recently.

“That’s an Earth Kingdom base,” Grantaire noted, slowing to a halt.  The gold circle and square on the green field of the flags hung out over the gate were unmistakable.

“Shit,” Éponine hissed, coming up to his shoulder and closing her hand tight around Gavroche’s collar so that he couldn’t go investigate.  “Can we just pass them by?  The woods are deeper on the other side of town, it would be better to camp there.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Grantaire allowed, because it was possible.  “Gonna make it tough to get work if we need food, though.”

“Bousset and I still could,” Joly offered.  “We’re not…”

“Fugitives,” Courf supplied helpfully.

“Yeah.”

“I’m not formally a wanted criminal either,” Éponine said.  “Unless Patron-Minette’s hit this town more recently than I know about, I could probably stay unnoticed.”

“Me too!” Gavroche said, bouncing against her grip on his collar.

“No,” Éponine and Grantaire chorused sternly.

E, frowning, slipped around Briseis and said, “Unless I’m very much mistaken, there’s a small river in the forest about…twenty minutes’ walk deeper in?  They might be using it already, but if they’re not it might be a good place to camp for the night.”

“Not with a mine there,” Ferre said.  “I grew up in a mining town,” he offered when the group turned to him.  “This town might be under the control of the Earth Kingdom, not the Fire Nation, but mines still need a lot of water—for the workers, and to clean the equipment, not to mention to help filter the minerals.  Even if they aren’t mining coal anymore, half the river will be part of the mining complex by now.”

“Besides,” Grantaire said, leaning against Briseis’ shoulder for the steady feel of her, “the army’s not stupid enough to abandon the mine completely.  If they’re smart, they’re still pulling coal out of there, to keep it stocked for themselves and limit the amount that the Fire Nation could get at if they take the town back.”

“So,” Joly mused, “who wants to roll the dice on town?”  Silence fell as they glanced at each other, and Éponine caught Gavroche’s hand and forced it down when he started to raise it. 

“I say we camp in the forest on the other side of the road, away from the river,” E said, gesturing neatly.  “We might be able to slip past the base before dawn.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Éponine conceded, and pressed her lips together as if resisting the urge to scowl at him.  “We could post a watch and sleep now, and get up in a few hours to pass the town in the dark, so the army doesn’t even know we were here.  It’s a few days to the next town, but it’s probably worth the walk.”

“Definitely worth it, I’d say,” Courf said, fingering his half-disguised armor thoughtfully.  “Don’t much care for the idea of being locked up as a deserter.”

“Well,” Grantaire announced, stepping forward.  “You can all do what you like, but you’re not getting me within a stone’s throw of that base for all the gold in the Fire Lord’s castle, so Briseis and I are going with that plan and anyone who wants to join us is more than welcome.  I’m sure there’s running water on the other side of the road, too.”  He gave Briseis a comradely thump on the shoulder with a closed fist, and when he crossed into the treeline, there was only a half second of surprised quiet before the others fell in behind him.

The camp they set up was rudimentary at best, in the shelter of the lee of the long hill, with their bedrolls ranged in a semicircle, clustered into small subgroups.  Ferre and Courf raised a low fire, barely more than embers, at the corner of where the ground sloped abruptly upward, the center of the ring of blankets.  Grantaire couldn’t hide some degree of discomfort with the idea of lighting a fire within a half-mile of the Earth Kingdom base, but their little group had grown overlarge to subsist on what they could forage from the forest.  The addition of some hunted meat would be necessary to feed them all, and the fire was undeniably necessary to be able to cook it.

The warmth was nice, though, he had to admit.

“Does she hunt on command?” E asked in a carefully cordial tone, eyeing Briseis as he stroked Patria in his lap.

“Yeah,” Grantaire said, fingers sliding along her rudimentary harness until he found and released the buckle behind her shoulder.  The leather straps slid to the ground and Briseis shook herself happily, prancing a few steps to step out of the harness’ loops before turning to press her massive head into Grantaire’s chest, driving him back a few steps.  “Hey,” he chuckled, burying both hands in her ruff to keep himself on his feet.  “Go find us something to cook, and stay out of sight, will you?”  Briseis closed her teeth on Grantaire’s jaw, a friendly nibble that probably looked quite dangerous if Joly’s noise of concern was any indication, and he tugged at one of her ears before releasing her to melt into the woods.

As soon as Briseis was out of sight, Patria crept out from behind E’s ankles and looked inquisitively up at Grantaire, until he knelt down and flipped her easily off her feet.  She nipped at him, swatting at his hands, and he scuffled with her for a moment before she settled into his lap for attention, sneezing primly at the scent of the grizzly wolf still left on his clothes.

“I’ve never seen her take to anyone like that,” E remarked, sitting down beside Grantaire with the same forcibly polite expression. 

“Ah, well,” Grantaire said as he allowed Patria to writhe free of his hands and scamper back to her master.  “Like I said.  I’ve always been good with animals.  Can I do something for you, or did you just want to talk animal husbandry?”

The direct question broke through the mask of civility like it was nothing more than rice paper—E scowled at him.  “Why did you desert the military?” he asked outright.  “Don’t you give a damn about what the Fire Nation’s doing to people?  They nearly _destroyed_ the Air Nomads--”

“And they’ve been kidnapping earthbenders for years, and they reduced the Southern Water Tribe by three quarters in one attack,” Grantaire interrupted.  “Yeah, I know.”

“And you don’t _care_?”

“Of course I care,” Grantaire said. 

The look E turned on him burned as clean and hot as any fire Grantaire had ever touched, those amber eyes flaring like the glint of light off a sword.  “Then _do something_.  What are you doing to stop them?”

Grantaire bared his teeth in a smile, leaning back on his hands, and said, “Nothing at all.  Didn’t you notice?”  Their voices had risen above the quiet murmur of the camp again, the others starting to look toward them.  Grantaire couldn’t quite bring himself to stop, swept along by some urge that he didn’t understand, some bone-deep _need_ to batter himself bloody against the perfect wall of assurance that E carried as lightly as the coat on his back.  E didn’t know what he was dealing with, but he saw clearly, saw Grantaire for what he was—a coward and a failed savior, a man who had turned his back on a world that needed help—and he was more than happy to tell Grantaire as much.

It was probably a sign of some terrible brokenness that Grantaire almost wanted to hear it.

“I noticed,” E said coldly.  Behind him, the fire went from a low smolder to flames three feet high, crackling hungrily as it chewed through its fuel.  “What was it?  The army expected you to give too much of a damn?  Wouldn’t give you enough time to drink yourself to death?  You couldn’t take orders?”

“Sure, all of those,” Grantaire said, still smiling, a brittle feeling spreading through his chest.  “We all know how this war is going to end.  Might as well be drunk for it.”  He snapped his fingers, as if just remembering, and said, “But oh, you want to go find the most useless person in this entire useless war, because he’ll definitely be able to fix it.  Assuming the Fire Nation hasn’t already caught him and bumped him off, I mean.”

“They haven’t,” E said confidently.  “And just because you’ve decided that the war’s already over--”

Éponine interrupted by way of kicking E sharply in the ribs and slapping Grantaire up the back of the head none too gently.

“Quiet,” she hissed down at them.  “If you can’t get along, sit on opposite sides of the camp.  E, stop fucking with the fire before the smoke brings the army down on us.  R, just—get it together, man, you’re not helping anyone with this shit.  First shift is going to sleep as soon as Briseis gets back.  E, do you want to take first or second watch?”

“First,” E said, and unfolded himself from the ground in a single swift movement, standing as stiff and straight as any soldier as he looked at Éponine.  It was as if, reminded of their circumstances, Grantaire had simply ceased to exist.  “I’ll go find new kindling.”

Éponine watched him go with a narrow look on her face.  Then she turned on Grantaire, still just as sharp, and said, “I’m not going to give you a lecture about believing in yourself, because we’re a little busy for that right now.  But keep your inner nihilist quiet until we’re away from a town, and then the two of you can have this out bare knuckle style for all I care.  Okay?”

“Yeah,” Grantaire said quietly, looking at his hands.  “I’m sorry, I didn’t—I’m sorry.”

Éponine sighed and crouched down to give him a firm poke in the side, hard enough to make him twitch away from the pain.  “Listen, I’m sure it’s—a lot to deal with,” she said.  “Having him here, looking for the Avatar.  I don’t know what your issues are, and you don’t have to tell me, but you’re doing half his work for him because you’re looking for someone to call you awful things.  If you really need that, pay a hooker.  Get yourself together for a few more days, and then he’ll be gone, and—we’ll figure something out, all right?”

“You don’t even know me,” Grantaire said with a cracked laugh.

“Yeah, well, my greatest failing as a criminal was an incurable tendency to take in strays,” Éponine remarked, clapping both hands together to send the dust flying off her dress as she stood.  “Ask anyone.  Don’t take a watch tonight, you still look like you’ve gone five rounds with a battleship.  Not even His Righteousness can argue with that.”

“I’m fine.”

“You fucking look it,” Éponine scoffed.  “Don’t take a watch.  Your monster should be back soon with something to eat and then you should go to sleep.  I’m going to go yell at a firebender, so if it looks like I’m about to die, sit tight and don’t do anything, I’m sure Joly can handle it.”

She was gone before Grantaire could argue, striding across the camp toward the fire and catching E as he returned with fresh wood to drag him out of earshot of the others.  Patria darted over to Grantaire as Éponine started in on her next victim, and he caught her up in his lap without a thought.  He loved Briseis to distraction, of course, she had stuck by him loyally all his life and, barring any catastrophic events, the bond of spirit guide to Avatar would keep her with him until he died, but sometimes it was nice to have a creature small enough to hold in his lap, he thought absently.  For all her display, Briseis wouldn’t hold it against him as long as he lavished the same attention on her later.

At the moment, though, Patria was small and warm and her undercoat was soft and thick when he pressed his hands through the stiffer guard hairs, and having her close eased some of the acid ache in his chest. 

* * *

Grantaire woke with a start, uncertain of what had changed.  The sky was still dark, the blackest shade of night after moonset and before sunrise, and the fire had been banked down to nothing but embers, a dim glow that barely illuminated the shape of Bousset sitting up beside it, spear in hand.  Beside Grantaire, Briseis was still sprawled out, careless, but where his shoulder pressed up against hers, he could feel the low vibration of a growl in her chest.

Hushing her, Grantaire slowly sat up, then shifted to his knees, and scanned the trees around him.  There was nothing there, not even the crunch and rustle of people moving in the dark, but—

“Bousset,” Grantaire whispered, rising and stepping toward the fire.  Bousset brought his spear up automatically.  “It’s me.  I think—I think we should leave.  Now.”

“Now?” Bousset repeated.  “It’s still an hour before we said we would leave.”

“Yeah?”  Grantaire raked both hands back through his hair and tried to pin down the creeping unease that had taken up residence in his spine.  It could have been paranoia—it didn’t take a scholar to know he had plenty of that—but on the other hand….  “I still think we should go.  I have a bad feeling.”

That made Bousset sit up straighter, his shadowy form attentive.  “A bad feeling like…?”

“A bad feeling like I don’t feel right,” Grantaire snapped.  “Just _bad_.  Like something’s coming.”

Bousset seemed to consider for a moment, then there was a nearly invisible movement in the dark, a nod.  “All right.  I believe you.  I’ll get the others up if you want to start packing up the camp.”

The air rushed out of Grantaire’s chest in a huff, and he cleared his throat.  It wasn’t Bousset’s fault that he got strange impressions and impulses.  “Thank you,” Grantaire said more quietly.  “I appreciate it.  I’m probably just stressed.”

“Better safe than sorry,” Bousset said cheerfully, and poked Joly with the butt of his spear before he stood.

Rousing the others took less time than buckling Briseis’ harness on, and within ten minutes E had smothered and scattered the last of the fire, leaving the camp as nothing more than a few spots of disturbed ground and a handful of charred wood fragments.

“Which way?” Éponine asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” Grantaire said, shaking his head and trying not to hunch his shoulders too obviously.  It was too dark to make out the faces around him as more than dim smudges in the starlight, but he could feel their eyes on him, imagine the expectant looks, and he wanted to snap that he didn’t have any answers, didn’t have _anything_ except a rising swell of nausea and a growing conviction that they were about to have trouble.  “I just think we should leave.  Down the road past town, I guess, as fast and quiet as we can, and hope the base doesn’t post a nightly guard.”

“Benders first,” E said, and there was a beat before he made an annoyed sound.  “Earthbenders, probably.  We might be able to bluff them, if there isn’t a firebender leading the charge.”

“That’s us,” Éponine said.  “R, can you tell Briseis to stay in the trees?  You and me first, then E and the soldiers, then Joly and Bousset at the back—sorry, guys.”

“You look the most remarkable,” E agreed.  “At least red looks grey in the dark.”

“All right, fine,” Grantaire said.  “Now let’s _go_ , please.  Briseis, hide.  Gav, go with her.”

“But--”

“Do it, kid,” Éponine said in her most forbidding tone, and Gavroche subsided into bitter silence, tucking a hand into Briseis’ harness as Grantaire patted her shoulder and pointed them both into the woods.  Watching the hulking silver shadow of her form disappear, with Gavroche’s smaller shape beside her, made the nerves down Grantaire’s neck prickle.

Grantaire had hoped that setting out would ease the creeping sense of doom, but instead it seemed to be getting stronger.  Every rustle in the trees ahead made him twitch, and the uncanny silence of the forest around them—no birds, no sounds of night animals, just the wind—made their breathing seem loud in his ears.  Éponine’s hand on his shoulder made him twitch so suddenly that he caught her in the ribs with a thoughtless backhand.

“Take a couple deep breaths,” Éponine whispered urgently in his ear, holding out a hand to stop the others.  “Can you hear that?”

“Probably,” Grantaire said through his teeth.  “What do you mean?”

She paused, hand still clenched in his shirt, and pointed behind them.  “Voices, I think.”

“Fuck,” Grantaire said, and closed his eyes, trying to close out the panicky rattle of his own heart and listen past it.  Breath in, breath out, he counseled himself.  Focus.  His heart fell away, then the wind, then the quiet noise of the others, until--  Grantaire opened his eyes.  “There’s a mounted squad in the woods,” he said, loud enough for the others to hear.  “They must be doing a perimeter sweep, they’re coming this way.”

“Do we fight or try to run?” Bousset asked.

“Run,” Ferre said.  “Fight only if we have to.  It would be best if they never saw us.”

“That’s a good instinct from a smart gentleman,” Grantaire agreed.  “If we move, we might be able to get out of their search radius before they get on our trail.  They won’t abandon their base to hunt down a couple people camping in the woods, but once they’ve seen us, we’re not going to be that lucky.”

They almost made it.  That was the part that, if he was being honest, frustrated Grantaire the most—not being caught, he’d been caught before, but how _close_ they were, past the gate of the town and nearly past the base itself.

In the end, though, seven people on foot against a squad of mounted soldiers was a weighted contest, and not in their favor.

“You there!  Identify yourselves!” 

Grantaire closed his eyes at the shout and elbowed Éponine, letting his hair fall forward until the long curls hung into his face.  “You do the talking,” he murmured.  “They might recognize me.”

“Someday we’re going to have a real talk about some stuff,” Éponine hissed, but when the Earth Kingdom soldiers galloped up and closed off the road ahead, she stepped forward with a smile and open hands, friendly.  “Is something wrong, soldiers?  I hope we haven’t disrupted anything.”

There was a moment of suspicious quiet, while the soldiers looked over their motley little group and Grantaire tried to do a rapid assessment of their odds, if this came to blows.  Seven of them against four soldiers—they would have a decent chance at winning a fight, but the question was whether they would be able to get out of the area before the base was alerted.  Four soldiers and their ostrich horses were manageable, if not ideal.  Reinforcements probably wouldn’t be, without—

Grantaire stopped that train of thought short before it could threaten to give him a panic attack.

“Can I ask what you’re doing out here in the middle of the night, ma’am?” the lead soldier asked, holding up a lantern to cast dim light over their group.  Grantaire prayed that Courf and Ferre had thought to step in front of E and his distinctive coat.

“Oh, sure,” Éponine said, chipper and bright like he’d never heard her.  “My name is Jeanne, and this is my brother, Marcus.  We’ve been traveling, and we’re headed home to help our family with the harvest—apparently the squash are coming in early.  We were hoping to get home yesterday, but there was this storm up north a few days ago and it held us up, so we thought we could walk overnight and make up some time.”

“And the rest?”

Éponine shrugged, bouncing on her toes as if a little bashful.  “Safety in numbers, you know?  While we were waiting out the storm we picked up a few more people going the same way, and we thought we could make the trip together.  Those two are escorting an old friend—he used to be a prisoner of war, can you believe that—and I don’t know what the others are doing but they’re nice enough, I think they’re going home to the South--”

The lantern, held up by the lead soldier, swayed in the wind, and Grantaire’s curls fluttered away from his eyes.

“Hang on,” one of the other soldiers interrupted, pushing his mount forward as Éponine shifted, as if to put herself in front of Grantaire.  “Don’t I know you?”

“My brother’s shy,” Éponine said sternly.

“Don’t think so,” Grantaire muttered, ducking his head more firmly.

“I do,” the soldier insisted, thrusting his own lantern forward so abruptly that the metal frame almost struck Grantaire in the face.  Éponine jerked him back sharply, but the damage was done—Grantaire, leaning away from the near-collision, looked up, and the soldier’s eyes widened as the light fell fully across his face.  “I’ll be damned,” the soldier breathed.

“Here we go,” Grantaire said as he braced his feet, and Éponine, beside him, sighed as she did the same.  There was a rustle behind them as E shifted in place, the soft clatter of weapons being drawn and the bubbling of water being called out of Joly’s canteen.

“Lieutenant, what is it?” the lead soldier asked, startled, and the soldier shook his head, mouth opening to speak.

The shockwave of Grantaire’s hands hitting dirt cracked the ground under the soldier’s mount open before he could say a word.  A scream from the man, and a ragged screech from the ostrich horse, and then they were gone as the ground sealed itself again, and chaos erupted.

“Stay down!” E barked, and Grantaire did as he said.  A blast of heat raced over his head just inches away, the dim yellow light of the lanterns swallowed by red and gold as the lead soldier’s clothes caught fire under his armor.  “Up!” E shouted as the leader started to scream and beat at his clothes.  Grantaire jumped to his feet and took his place beside Éponine again.

“Do you know how to bend in a group?” she called over the din.  Courf rushed forward, short spear braced against his side as he drove it into an ostrich horse and toppled its rider.

“Do _you_?”

“Sort of!”

Grantaire nodded and mirrored her stance.  “Follow me.”  He caught her eye and said, “One, two, three.”  They took a step, right foot forward, heel down—breath in, breath out, move—and the ground shook again.  Éponine’s movements weren’t as smooth as Grantaire might have liked, clearly self-taught compared to his formal education, but she kept up as he swept both hands to the side, and the ground rolled like a stormy sea.  An ostrich horse broke, bucked, and sent its rider crashing down, and Bousset hit him hard in the ribs with the butt of his spear.

“Are we killing them?” he called.  Ferre roared up on his side like an avalanche, twin swords still sheathed across his back, and slammed a kick into the soldier’s jaw that laid him out cold.

“Doesn’t really matter, this wasn’t subtle,” Courf said breathlessly, his spear still lodged in the side of a downed ostrich horse as he fought its rider, knife against sword.  “A hand, please!”

“Duck!” Joly shouted, and Courf collapsed in place as water lashed over his head, hard enough to send the soldier back.  As Courf rolled to his feet, he shoved his dagger through a break in the soldier’s armor, under the arm.

“We need to get moving, now,” Grantaire said, running up to catch Ferre by the arm.  The lead soldier had fallen from his ostrich horse in the chaos, the flames mostly extinguished by the dust and leaving him unconscious and scorched in the road.  “We lost two of their mounts, it’ll alert the base when they gets back to their stable alone.  Leave them—if they live, they live.  We don’t have time for this.”

Ferre shook him off and nodded, turning on Grantaire with narrowed eyes just visible in the light of the last lantern, broken on its side but still burning through its supply of oil as it seeped into the dirt.

“How did that man know who you were?” Ferre demanded.  “Why are you this valuable to the Earth Kingdom?  Deserters aren’t that scared.  Not like you were.”

“Not your problem,” Grantaire said shortly.  “Let’s go.”

“Let’s stay,” Ferre said, a thread of ice tracing through his low voice.  “I think you’re probably more worried about being here than we are, and that’s saying something.  So you tell me, friend.  What kind of crimes have you committed against the Earth Kingdom that you’d rather make the ground swallow someone whole than have them announced?”

“Treason?” Courf offered.  He wrenched his spear out of the dead ostrich horse and wiped the head off in the grass, crouching down and watching Grantaire with calm interest. 

“How about we make a deal,” Grantaire said, offering a smile that probably looked ghoulish in the dimming light of the broken oil lamp.  “You don’t ask me any questions, and I don’t get too curious about how close to treasonous it is for two soldiers to desert and steal a prisoner of war.  Sound good?”

E stepped forward, until he was barely a handspan from Grantaire, close enough that he had to look up to meet his eyes.  The pale light from the stars turned his hair into silver, and he smelled like smoke and ozone, those amber eyes hidden in the dark ring of his pupils and his face unnervingly still.  Grantaire looked back and tried not to show how shaken he felt.

“You knew they were coming,” E said.  “They came from behind the camp, not from the base, but you still knew.  How did you do that?”

“Natural talent,” Grantaire said, and E made a noise of irritation at the glib answer.  “I’ve always been good at that sort of thing.  Does it really matter that much?  If I was a spy planning to hand your firebending ass in, I’d have done it just now.”

“Yeah,” E said, stepping back, and Grantaire sucked in a breath of air like he’d been underwater for too long.  “I noticed that.  But that doesn’t answer my question.”

“You’re not getting an answer tonight, Your Highness,” Grantaire snapped, and he retreated, one step, then two, and tried to make it look like he wasn’t running.  He nearly tripped as his ankle connected with Patria, darting out of the trees to rejoin them, and he went still, feeling his chest clench tight.

“No,” E said.  That eerie calm lingered as the broken lamp burned through the last of its oil and went dark.  “I see that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: an interlude with a surprise guest from the Fire Nation.
> 
> If literally anyone has stuck around through this hiatus, I love you, blessings be upon you and your house, you're amazing, etc. In the past year and a half, loyal readers, I got a bachelor's (technically two bachelor's, but that's complicated) in pre-medical studies, moved across three states, and took the world's shortest EMT class. Now I'm gonna get a couple jobs, so I can't promise that I'm going to be, you know, PROMPT with chapters, but this is officially off hiatus and I have a good idea of the immediate future of the plot, if not the grander scale.
> 
> I am [on Tumblr](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/), although my blog has little to no Les Mis on it these days and is about 85% Critical Role by volume at the moment.


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